A full Federal Court has clarified the extent to which employers must investigate alternative roles for workers caught up in restructures, finding that a mining company had an obligation to assess whether employees could replace already-engaged contractors before making them redundant.
"Similarities" with the case of a worker awarded compensation after being shown the door for missing a COVID-19 vaccination deadline have not been enough to persuade the FWC that a public utility unfairly dismissed an employee when it denied him a chance to wait for a Novavax jab.
A judge has been forced to pick apart a full court's remittal order before determining that he must rehear a worker's adverse action case afresh rather than merely considering "updated" evidence.
A big employer's failure to give union representatives a "heads up" that it would impose a vaccination mandate did not necessarily render its subsequent dismissal of 25 workers unfair, the FWC has found.
Australia's largest tertiary education sector employer has commended the regulatory inclusion of s-xual harassment among instances of serious misconduct as having produced a "nuanced" shift wherein the emphasis is no longer on why perpetrators should be dismissed, but rather on why they "should not" be sacked.
A large employer had no need to pay for external lawyers when it could have relied on its HR team to argue against a former employee's "straightforward" vaccination case, the FWC has found.
A major mining company should have paid untaken sick leave to 20 retrenched employees, the Federal Court has ruled, in a judgment closely examining how the Fair Work Act's high-income threshold applies to annualised salaries.
A former public health service chief executive who claimed discrimination on the basis of "severe depression" has failed to overturn a tribunal's finding that it lacks the power to hear his bid for reinstatement and compensation.
A Federal Court judge has affirmed the primacy of federal over state laws in determining that NSW workers compensation caps did not shackle the amounts he could award to a long-serving manager whose life was "effectively destroyed" by a new chief executive.
In a significant decision regarding the statutory meaning of "dismissed", a five-member FWC bench majority has ruled that an employer did not sack a worker when it shaved almost 10% off his annual pay for disciplinary reasons.
