Employment Minister Eric Abetz has declared that a frozen wage is better than no job, while refusing to comment on pay freeze deals being struck by individual employers.
A major IT company had a valid reason to sack a project manager who wrongly claimed overnight expenses on 141 occasions over less than 12 months, but his dismissal was unfair given his long and otherwise unblemished service and the long delay in investigating the misconduct, the Fair Work Commission has ruled.
Increasing labour's share of the pie is one of the keys to re-igniting global economic growth, according to a report prepared for a meeting of G20 labour and employment ministers in Melbourne.
Tasmania's Hodgman Government has introduced draft legislation for its proposal to impose a 12-month freeze on the wages and incremental increases of the state's 24,000 public servants and remove the State IRC's power to award future pay increases above a 2% Government-set cap.
The Fair Work Commission has granted a company's request for good faith bargaining orders to provide for separate negotiations over four agreements in one case, but has knocked back a union's application for orders in another after finding that the employer was entitled to take a "hard" position in discussions.
The Federal Circuit Court has awarded a long-distance bus driver $13,000 after rejecting his employer's argument that he was employed to work shifts rather than calendar days and therefore not entitled to a living away from home allowance.
The Abbott Government this morning introduced a Bill in the House of Representatives to cap redundancy payments under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee scheme at a maximum of 16 weeks, describing the current benefits for employees of insolvent companies as "overly generous" and as creating a "moral hazard".
A Federal Court full bench has overturned a lower court's interpretation of an employment contract, finding that it had wrongly taken account of the parties' conduct after it commenced.