A new deal covering Westpac's call centre in Launceston, Tasmania, allows the business to become a 24-hour/seven-day operation, with employees paid penalties based on an hours grid.
AMWU national organiser Neil Marshall is one of eight people missing, presumed dead, after the plane they were aboard disappeared in the Upper Spencer Gulf near Whyalla in South Australia on Wednesday night.
Union efforts to convince the Democrats that the Government's pattern bargaining bill will unfairly tip the bargaining balance in employers' favour appear to have paid off, with the party signalling yesterday that it had stepped back from its earlier position of being more inclined to amend than reject the legislation.
A full bench of the IRC has given the ASU an opening to re-unionise middle managers and administrative employees by striking out an exemption clause in a breweries award.
NSW unions have had a major win on contracting out, with the Roads and Transport Minister ensuring award conditions won't be undercut by insisting that all tenderers for outsourced work in his portfolio will have to negotiate awards or agreements with unions.
Some 25,000 Commonwealth Bank employees plan to strike for 24 hours on Friday June 9, after the bank failed to meet the Finance Sector Union's May 25 deadline for boosting its wages offer of 2% a year plus performance pay.
In another indication that wage growth is remaining steady in the face of the GST, growing labour shortages and union bargaining campaigns, the ABS Wage Cost Index has shown an increase in hourly rates of pay excluding bonuses of just 0.7% in the first quarter of 2000 and 2.8% in the past year.
Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has given a commitment that a Labor Government would abolish AWAs and the Office of the Employment Advocate, but said he'd only recently decided his position on AWAs after considering the possibility of a modified form of statutory individual contract.
Enterprise agreements registered in the first quarter provide no evidence of a pre-GST wages breakout, with private sector deals showing average annual increases of 3.6% per employee (up from 3.5%) and just 6% of employees covered by agreements containing GST clauses.
