Protected Employee Claim Action and Enterprise Agreement Approval Process

(a)
According to the law, protected employee claim action can be taken only if the proposed action
was approved by a vote that has taken place in protected action ballot. However, it is not
applicable to employee response action due to the reason that it is taken only in response to the
employer response action that has occurred as a response to protected employee claim action.
The protection against the initial employee claim action is based on the employer response action
(Creighton, 1998). Therefore the law provides that protected in this election should start within
30 days from the date of announcement of the result of the vote or if this period has been
increased by the Commission for further 30 days, during this period. When the ballot authorizes
different types of industrial action, any one particular interest elections should be started within
30 days so that the industrial action may remain protected even after the expiry of 30 days
(Billing, 2009). However before initiating protected in this election, the following steps have to
be completed by the union in the present case.
There should be a notification time regarding the planned enterprise agreement (bargaining has
started).
The application for Protected Action Ballot Order should be made by the Commission.
The protected action ballot should have been carried out by the AEC (or an another ballot agent)
Notice should be given regarding protected in the selection to the employer

The protected industrial action can be initiated after the above-mentioned steps have been
completed.
In this regard, the Fair Work Act, 2009 (Cth) provides the basic requirements related to the
persons who can start protected industrial action in a number of sections. These sections of the
above-mentioned legislation can be briefly described as follows:
In order to be eligible for taking protected employee claim action, it is required by the law that
the employee should be:
 In the group of employees that has been specifically mentioned in the Protected Action
Ballot Order.
 The employee should fall under the proposed enterprise agreement and either the
employee should be the presented by bargaining representative who had applied for
protected action ballot order or
 The worker should be about gaining representative for themselves, as well as a union
member (in case the union applief for protected action ballot order) and
 The employee should be eligible for being included in the roll of voters.
On the other hand, if the employee is not eligible for voting, such employee cannot be allowed to
take protected industrial action.
An employee can be considered as being eligible for being included on the roll of voters. In case
they are otherwise eligible for voting in protected action ballot.
(b)

It has been provided by regulation 2.06A, that there is a need for the bargaining that presented
them to apply for approval of the FWA of an enterprise agreement. According to paragraph
185(2)(a) of the Act, it is necessary that an application for Fair Work, Australia to approve an
end price agreement should be submitted alongwith agreement’s signed copy. In this regard it
has been clearly stated by regulation 2.06A that the copy of the enterprise agreement is a signed
provided that the document has been signed by the employer falling under the agreement and
also by no less than one employee delegate falling under the agreement (Catanzariti, 2002).
Unless the representative of the employees is also an employee in the class who are going to be
bound by the agreement, the signature of the representative are not considered to indicate that it
was the intention of the representative as being bound by agreement (Cooney, 2006).
After the enterprise agreement has been made by the union, the bargaining representative
concerned with the agreement is required by the law to make an application to the Commission
for approving the agreement. This can be done by using Form F16 that is available on the
website of the commission. The law requires that the application for the approval of the
agreement should be made to the commission in 14 days of the making of the agreement or in
such additional instance as allowed by the Commission (Catanzariti and Shariff, 2005). Similarly
it is necessary that the application for the approval should be made with a signed copy and any
statement that is necessary under the Fair Work Commission Rules 2013 or the regulations
which go together with the form.
The organizations that are not listed as a bargaining representative in the application form can
make a request for access to enterprise agreement application approval documents. In case the
application is not providing access to application documents, it does not mean that such
organization is or has become a party to the application. Similarly, it does not follow that such