Dear Reader,
Did you hear about this recent case?
A Western Australian employer was left $60,000 out of pocket after two of his employees made an underpayment claim against him.
Did the employer mean to underpay his employees? Not at all…
Posts Tagged ‘Industrial Relations’
5 Proposed Changes to Australia’s Industrial Relations System
Find Out How the 5 Proposed Changes to Australia’s IR System Are Set to Affect You
Tuesday, 23 September – Melbourne, Australia
In this week’s Workplace Bulletin:
- Important Industrial Relations Update!
- Workplace Helpdesk Q and A: Probationary Periods
Dear Reader,
Last week, Julia Gillard, the Minister for Industrial Relations, released new information about the Federal Government’s proposed changes to Australian workplace law. These changes will affect 5 areas of employment law:
- Unfair Dismissal – A Fair Dismissal Code has now been released by the government. If employers with 15 or less employees comply with this Fair Dismissal Code, any dismissal they make will be deemed fair. These changes to unfair dismissal laws will take effect on 1 July 2009.
Transition Time – Federal IR Changes Made Simple
The federal Labor government introduced its first piece of industrial relations legislation into parliament on February 13. Known as the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill, it is the government’s first step in dismantling the WorkChoices system and implementing its own industrial relations policies.
The Bill
The focus of the Bill is to abolish Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs). Existing AWAs will be allowed to continue until they are terminated or replaced, which means they could continue to operate well into the next decade – and later. However, the new legislation will ban new AWAs.
Certain statutory individual agreements, known as ITEAs, will be allowed. To be eligible to create one of these agreements, however, an employer must have had at least one employee on an AWA on or before 1 December 2007.
ITEAs will be subject to a stricter no disadvantage test than AWAs were under the Fairness Test system. ITEAs must ensure that employees’ conditions are no worse than those of an applicable collective agreement (if one exists), where AWAs only had to compensate employees for loss of certain key award conditions – and this only applied to employees earning less that $70,000 p.a.
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