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While Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews today rejected suggestions that low-wage employees would be disadvantaged by regulations allowing minimum wage averaging, practitioners also raised concerns that salary sacrificing for the low-paid could be abused.

Unions are likely to find ways to circumvent the new ban on providing unfair dismissal remedies in agreements, while the results of next year's NSW election could be the key to whether a truly national IR system can get up, Flinders University Professor of Law Andrew Stewart told a Sydney conference today. He also explained how next week's re-numbering of the Workplace Relations Act would work.

News Ltd and its contractor Group 4 Securitas have been ordered to pay a total of $1.9 million in damages to a former security guard subject to extreme bullying and intimidation by his supervisor.

SA employers have 27 days to apply for exemption to minimum wage; Esso Bass Strait agreements confirm 7-day rosters; Unions plan mass rally against Work Choices on June 28; AMA steps up pressure over Work Choices medical certificates; Women lift union density in the UK; and UK discrimination laws remove redundancy age limit.

Security guards in Victoria will receive a 3.2% work value increase, while crowd controllers' work value has grown to such an extent that they will get a 6.5% rise, following an AIRC ruling.

AMA says Work Choices medical certificate provisions are flawed; Bird flu could see 60% of workforce absent for up to four weeks: Mercer report; and ACTU calls for inquiry into skilled visa program.

The Howard Government's $83m funding over three years to encourage workplace change in higher education won't focus on key items on the Government's IR agenda - such as fostering direct relationships with employees - until the second and third years of the program.

Work Choices has made IR regulation so complex that employers will increasingly spurn it and rely on HR policy to prescribe practices in the workplace, ACIRRT's John Buchanan told the weekend's HR Nicholls conference. And in a separate address to the conference, the MBAV said the next bargaining round is the chance to do non-union deals.

Suncorp is re-engineering its recruitment systems and has now virtually dropped all print advertising for specific job roles.

NSW childcare workers have won pay rises averaging 16% in the NSW IRC's first specific pay equity case judgment.