News

Independent Contractors Might Be A Threatened Species

And you thought it was just an Australian issue. Wrong! The Supreme Court of California (yes, you read correctly, California) handed down a decision at the end of 2018 in a case involving the trucking firm Dynamex Operations West. Dynamex was using a business model that is popular in Australia where its drivers supplied their own vehicles (and fuelled and…
February 26, 2019
News

Is the Fair Work Commission about to get a power boost?

Next month it will be thirteen years since the Howard Government introduced WorkChoices. It was then the most radical change in employment laws in Australia for close on a century. It amounted to a full throttle deregulation of the labour market. The union movement hated it and ultimately WorkChoices played a major role in the defeat of the Howard Government…
February 19, 2019
News

Labor Party IR Policy Announced (Sort Of)

I had been waiting anxiously to advise all Workplace Advisory Group clients and readers of this blog about the industrial relations policy that a Shorten Labor Government would implement when it took office. I’d hoped the ALP National Conference would give me some meaty content upon which to blog. I got that wrong! Bill Shorten has announced the IR policy…
January 7, 2019
Tips

Who’s Really A Subcontractor?

For those who follow my blog or who are clients of Workplace Advisory Group, you will know that the question of what really constitutes a bona fide sub contract relationship looms large in Australian workplaces. For months now we have seen a sustained assault in the courts against so-called subcontractor relationships. Probably the highest profile case has been one that…
November 22, 2018