The ''Workplace Relations Act 1996'' was an Australian law regarding workplace conditions and rights passed by the
Howard government after it came into power in 1996. It replaced the previous
Labor
Labour or labor may refer to:
* Childbirth, the delivery of a baby
* Labour (human activity), or work
** Manual labour, physical work
** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer
** Organized labour and the labour ...
Government's ''
Industrial Relations Act 1988'', and commenced operation on 1 January 1997. In 2005, the
Howard government passed the ''
Workplace Relations Amendment Act 2005'' which came into effect on 27 March 2006 and substantially amended the original Act, bringing in the ''
WorkChoices'' changes to
Australian labour law
Australian labour law concerns Commonwealth, state, and common law on rights and duties of workers, unions and employers in Australia. Australian labour law (also known as industrial relations law) has a dual structure, where some employment is ...
. The Act was repealed on 1 July 2009 by the ''
Fair Work Act 2009'' passed by the
Rudd Labor Government
''Scardinius'' is a genus of ray-finned fish in the family Cyprinidae commonly called rudds. Locally, the name "rudd" without any further qualifiers is also used for individual species, particularly the common rudd (''S. erythrophthalmus''). The ...
,
and superseded by the ''
Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act 2009''.
Provisions
The Act provided for the continuation of the existing federal award system which provided a minimum set of terms and conditions for employment. It kept the previous
Australian Industrial Relations Commission, which continued to determine federal awards but whose determinations were restricted to consideration of just 20 "allowable award matters", namely:
*classification of employees
*hours of work
*rates of pay
*piece rates, tallies and bonuses
*various forms of leave (e.g. annual and long service leave)
*public holidays
*allowances
*penalty rates
*redundancy pay
*notice of termination
*dispute settling procedures
*stand down provisions
*jury service
*pay and conditions
Some of its provisions upon first being enacted included:
*the introduction of
Australian Workplace Agreements, a form of individual contract which can override collective agreements;
*expansion of the use of
enterprise bargaining agreement
Enterprise bargaining is an Australian term for a form of collective bargaining, in which wages and working conditions are negotiated at the level of the individual organisations, as distinct from sectoral collective bargaining across whole indust ...
s;
*a reduction of the allowable matters in federal awards to 20;
*restrictions on union activity; and
*outlawing
closed shops.
Associated regulations
The original regulations associated with the Act, the ''Workplace Relations Regulations 1996'', were repealed and replaced with the ''Workplace Relations Regulations 2006'' in order to accommodate the ''
WorkChoices'' amendments to the ''Workplace Relations Act 1996'' introduced on 27 March 2006.
comlaw.gov.au
/ref> Those regulations were themselves repealed when the ''Fair Work Act 2009'' commenced on 1 July 2009.
References
1996 in Australian law
Australian labour law
Acts of the Parliament of Australia
Minimum wage law
1996 in politics
Industrial agreements
1996 in labor relations
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