Recently, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2012 was officially passed by the Australian Senate and now awaits royal assent when it will formally be made a law. The Bill includes a number of amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009, many of them technical, recommended by the independent Fair Work Act Review along with numerous other stakeholders.
Many of these changes may have implications to the way your business operates. They include –
Fair Work Commission
Fair Work Australia will now be renamed to the Fair Work Commission and two new additional Vice President positions will be created.
Unfair Dismissal
Time limits for lodging certain claims will be altered to a uniform timeframe of 21 days. This includes the extension of the timeframe for unfair dismissal claims up from 14 days and the reduction in the timeframe for general protection claims down from 60 days.
The Fair Work Commission will be provided with increased powers to not only dismiss applications in certain circumstances, but to also award costs against parties where an unreasonable act or omission during an unfair dismissal matter has incurred costs to another.
Default Superannuation Arrangements
Outlined by the Productivity Commission’s inquiry, a new process will be implemented for the Fair Work Commission to assess applications from funds that wish to have generic MySuper products included as default funds in modern awards.
Enterprise Agreements
The Fair Work Act Amendment Bill will result in opt-out clauses in enterprise agreements no longer being permitted. It will also prohibit statutory enterprise agreements with a single employee.
There are also a number of other technical and clarifying recommendations made by the Fair Work Act Review affecting a range of procedures including scope order applications, modern award variation applications and protected action ballots that will be implemented in the Bill.
More information on the changes included in the Fair Work Act Amendment Bill can be found here.
