A Newcastle-based church unfairly summarily dismissed a worker when it took the view that no-one vaccinated against COVID-19 could work for it because it viewed the inoculation as "the world's largest ever untested medical experiment", and retrospectively applied the policy to the worker without warning.
The High Court will consider whether employers' duty of care and consequent exposure to damages extends to providing "safe" disciplinary and dismissal processes that protect sacked workers from psychiatric injury.
The FWC has rejected an employer's bid to wind up a general manager's unfair dismissal case after finding that neither of two settlement offers could be regarded as binding.
A small not-for-profit organisation with no shortage of valid reasons for dismissing a finance manager who "disappeared" during an audit period has nevertheless been ordered to pay her more than $12,000 compensation after the FWC found its executive director should not have acted as "judge, jury and executioner" by overseeing the entire disciplinary process.
The FWC has awarded compensation to an accounts assistant who said she could not return to the office after working from home for almost a decade, while her employer maintained that the arrangement only began with the pandemic.
The Queensland IRC has refused a bid by Together Queensland to anonymise or remove a worker's name from her ex-husband's unfair dismissal decision, which refers to her application for an order under the State Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act.
FWC President Adam Hatcher has told a paid IR agent it will have to clear a full bench hurdle before winning permission to appear in future cases before the tribunal, after it ignored directions to repay a settlement sum that never found its way to a client.
The FWC has taken a leading law firm to task over its protracted investigation of three TAFE employees accused of fraudulent, dishonest and corrupt behaviour, rejecting findings of misconduct that led to their dismissal and ordering their reinstatement.
A Clive Palmer-owned business must pay a worker almost $40,000 for dismissing him by email along with 125 other employees, claiming he failed to work his hours amid site-wide fraud, theft and dishonesty,, and then asking him to re-apply for his job 20 minutes later.
A football club's "deficient" investigation and lack of procedural fairness rendered unfair its sacking of a worker for spreading "false and degrading s-xualised rumours" in the workplace, the FWC has found.