The year 2020 will be forever linked with the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue of Workplace Review has devoted a number of articles to the way in which the legal profession and the industrial relations world has come to terms with the lockdown and social distancing. It is clear that the practice of law may never return to what it was, as indeed the wider workplace itself. [...] Continue Reading…

quarantine ; (noun) a period of time when an animal or person that has or may have a disease is kept away from others to prevent the disease from spreading. Its origin is mid 17th century: from the Italian quarantina ‘forty days’; from quaranta ‘forty’.

In the past year there has been no more used word, a word in every daily newspaper, every radio and television news bulletin. The concept is not new and has been well understood. [...] Continue Reading…

What do a woman hit by a cricket ball in 1947 while standing outside a cricket ground in Manchester[1], damage by fire to two ships in 1951 in Mort Bay Sydney Harbour[2] and a water skiing accident in Tuggerah Lakes[3] in 1967 have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic? [...] Continue Reading…

I attended an online funeral in the second week of September for Peter Kelly a colleague of mine with whom I worked forty years ago in the national office of the Federated Ironworkers Association ( FIA). Kelly was the FIA’s Public Affairs Officer. Kelly as the complete autodidact having been born in humble circumstances in 1930 in Launceston, brought up in the Depression and whose father served overseas in World War II. With little formal education Kelly worked in the printing industry and became a proofreader He developed a great love of books mainly politics, history and biography. [...] Continue Reading…

Combating the scourge of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying in the workplaces of the legal profession, should not be done at the expense of abandoning fundamental principles of natural justice, argues Jeff Phillips. [...] Continue Reading…