Unions win protections for employees in significant IR Act amendments
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- Published: Wednesday, 16 July 2025 16:52
The NSW Labor Government committed to a review of the Industrial Relations Act 1996 (which underpins everything we do, and the employment of local government employees across the state) as one of their first decisions. They had been pressed to do so by Unions NSW on behalf of New South Wales registered unions, who skilfully managed the process and the extraction of improvements from the Government. depa is an affiliate of Unions NSW and, just like being a union member at work, it pays to belong.
The process has been managed by Industrial Relations Minister Sophie Cotsis, with the appointment of a panel - former IRC President Roger Boland with significant experience and expertise in the NSW jurisdiction, and Fair Work Ombudsman and advocate of “interests-based bargaining”, for want of a better term, Anna Booth.
As the IR Commission now only covers the NSW public sector and local government, there was a heavy public sector focus - a monolithic and old-fashioned structure that had ignored the significant modernisation and flexibility enabled by the Local Government State Award.
Boland/Booth made a number of recommendations but because the Government, for reasons known only to itself, refused to share the report, we can only speculate on the report’s contents but after some unnecessary delays, amendments passed through Parliament without opposition and are already law, providing enhanced protection for workers:
- Enables unions to run WHS prosecutions and receive a moity (a proportion of the penalty) for successful cases;
- Enshrines gender equality and the elimination of workplace bullying and sexual harassment as explicit objectives of the IR Act;
- Strengthens WHS compliance by allowing unions to bring forward prosecutions with moiety for WHS breaches following consulting with SafeWork NSW;
- Implements a new workplace bullying and sexual harassment jurisdiction at the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC);
- Empowers the IRC to facilitate return-to-work for injured employees in the public sector and local government;
- Allows unions and employers to have unresolved WHS disputes heard independently by the IRC;
- Creates new powers to hold SafeWork NSW to account by allowing unions to seek reviews of its decisions; and
- Makes it mandatory for employers to comply with the WHS codes of practice or a higher standard.
These are significantly enhanced protections and action under these new areas of jurisdiction will be pursued across the industry.
We record our thanks to Unions NSW Secretary Mark Morey and his astonishingly effective team, particularly, for their dogged determination to get this done - notwithstanding the continuing stand-off with Government over their pernicious plans for slashing and burning Workers’ Compensation.