The ACTU has fired its first salvo at new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, calling on him to stop the Coalition's "attacks" on conditions such as penalty rates and paid parental leave.
The in-principle agreement covering workers employed by the head contractor for the massive Gorgon LNG project includes paid "bed busts", when their work stint is reduced due to a shortage of accommodation.
Employers are likely to maintain their own paid parental leave schemes even if the Abbott Government's proposed Bill to prevent so-called parent "double-dipping" into government and employer-funded schemes becomes law, according to a key employer group.
Westpac and the FSU have reached an in-principle agreement on a new agreement covering about 30,000 employees across Westpac and its subsidiary banks that will for the first time remove the link between performance targets and fixed pay increases for all staff earning less than $75,000 per annum.
A company's parental leave policy – which breached the NES by making unpaid parental leave only available to "primary" caregivers - has cost it $170,000 in the unpaid wages and redundancy pay that an employee would have received if he had been allowed to access the leave and its flow-on benefits.
Australia's largest rail freight operator, Aurizon, has been ordered to provide the full pro-rata rate of pay to a train driver who was to receive a reduced amount under a compassionate grounds/short-term medical disability clause when she returned part-time from maternity leave.
Nannies won't need formal childcare training to participate in the federal government's new $246m two-year trial to help shiftworkers and those in rural and regional areas to meet the costs of home-based care.
Two BHP Coal employees who helped look after their newborn babies while their partners recovered from caesarean sections were not entitled to parental leave as the primary care givers under the company's enterprise agreement, the FWC has ruled.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has conceded that savings "won't be vast" from cutting the maximum payment under its paid parental leave scheme to $50,000, while the Greens are pushing for the new regime to be fully-funded by the Coalition's proposed levy on business.
