“To have a genuinely national system there will at some point need to be a rationalisation of the ten-plus State and Federal agencies and tribunals.  Industry, however, would have serious concerns with a new agency that diminished the functions and independence of key institutions within the WorkChoices workplace relations system such as the Australian Industrial [...]

 
Online and offline, bullying is a serious workplace problem. When did Australia become a land of cowards who puff themselves up at the expense of others?
 
Online bullying became a worldwide talking point in November 2008 when 49-yearold Lori Drew was convicted of cyber-bullying her daughter’s classmate Megan Meier, who committed suicide. In the same year, [...]

 
Australia is one step closer to a national industrial relations system under draft laws the federal government has introduced to parliament.
 
The legislation aims to end the overlap and duplication of state and federal workplace relations systems that continued to cause inefficiency and uncertainty as well as legal complexity, Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says.
 
The Fair [...]

THE gender pay gap is not just a ”women’s problem” and legislation should be renamed the Workplace Equality Act to ditch the stereotype, the Federal Government’s equal opportunity agency has argued.
It has also called for the power to target companies it believes are underpaying female staff and send in inspectors to conduct pay audits.
The agency’s [...]

Unions will know in the next two weeks the extent of powers the new industrial body, Fair Work Australia, will have to oversee the building and construction industry.
Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard has brushed off accusations the government has tried to silence debate about the fate of the Howard government’s construction industry watchdog.
Unrest over the [...]

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has backed away from a pledge that no worker would be left worse off by award modernisation, saying that remained the government’s objective but was never a guarantee.
Under Labor’s overhaul of the system, more than 4,000 state and federal awards are set to be streamlined into 130 new national awards.
But the [...]

Media release

Appointment of Executive Director to Fair Work Australia

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, is pleased to announce the appointment of Ms Marion van Rooden as the Executive Director of the Fair Work Australia Establishment Taskforce.
Applications were sought in August 2008 for an Executive Director to commence the necessary planning, stakeholder engagement [...]

It is nearly two years since former Prime Minister John Howard’s government was defeated in an electoral landslide, in no small part due to opposition to its hated “Work Choices” laws, which helped employers impose individual contracts on workers.
Workers were led to believe—or at least hope—by their unions that “your rights at work” would be [...]

A peak business group has accused the new workplace regulator Fair Work Australia of overstepping its power, claiming it is allowing unions to “frustrate democratic processes”.
A series of decisions by Fair Work Australia to block or delay votes on workplace agreements, and order companies to meet with unions, prompted the Australian Industry Group to yesterday [...]

The Rudd government has a mandate to reform the powers of the building and construction industry watchdog, Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says.
Her comments come after a Labor-dominated Senate committee released a report backing government plans to replace the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) with an inspectorate with watered down powers inside Fair Work [...]