Diversity & equal rights

International Women’s Day for 2024 has the important theme of Count Her In: Invest in Women. The UN talks about the importance of empowering women and investing in women in a range of ways. This includes accelerating women’s economic empowerment by recognising that when women entrepreneurs are successful, this can lead to more benefits.

The

In a previous blog, we summarised the recent case of Groff v. Dejoy, where the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously clarified the undue hardship standard under Title VII, a federal law in the United States that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, and national origin.

The decision is in line with

This year, the campaign theme for International Women’s Day is #EmbraceEquity. This theme encourages people to acknowledge and understand that providing equal opportunities is not enough to achieve inclusivity. This is because equality-based solutions assume a level playing field––the same resources are allocated to all, disregarding the fact that those at a disadvantage will remain

Employers around Australia will need to review and centralise sexual harassment prevention initiatives in light of the new duty in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 to take “reasonable and proportionate” measures to prevent sexual harassment.

The nature and extent of this positive duty will be the subject of much legal argument. But what is clear

We have seen a market driven push for companies to embrace diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies over the last few years, which reflects a key shift in social and cultural norms for many organisations. Increasingly, consumers, staff and senior business leaders expect proactive steps to be taken for D&I objectives. Research demonstrates a strong business

In our fourth and final part of our Modern Slavery Reporting Series, we provide our practical recommendations for moving into the third reporting season to ensure your organisation has a compliant and robust modern slavery Statement and reporting framework.

Organisations should now have established frameworks for how they aim to combat modern slavery within their

In Part 2 of our series, we set out our insights on what differentiates the few organisations who are noticeably leading the pack in their disclosure obligations under the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) (Act) – how they are going above and beyond the minimum requirements of the Act to understand their supply chains and

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) (Act) was developed with the intention to drive a ‘race to the top’ by organisations to properly identify, address and report modern slavery risks in global supply chains.

However, our review of the modern slavery Statements submitted to date and consideration of various reports commentating on these issues (including

The beginning of 2022 has marked the commencement of the third reporting season under the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) (Act). All eligible entities operating on the Australian financial year should have submitted their second modern slavery statement by the end of December 2021. Those operating on a calendar financial year are due to submit

There’s been a lot of debate in mainstream and social media in the past week about major Australian corporates removing pay secrecy clauses from their employment contracts. The Financial Services Union is keeping sustained pressure on employers in that industry to remove the clauses from their employment contracts. The Labor Party has made it known