A paid agent claiming to have never been told of any complaints about its services has welcomed FWC suggestions to regulate the industry while insisting the Commission should "surgically" root out "bad actors" rather than take a shotgun approach that could raise costs for workers contesting dismissals.
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.
The Law Council has endorsed the FWC's quest for stricter regulation of paid agents, but warned it off considering the "capacity" of lawyers to act for parties in cases before the Commission.
The FWC is seeking submissions on the latest phase of its research on gender-based occupational segregation, which has been released ahead of this year's annual wage review.
Autistic people need employment support and training, Autism-friendly workplaces and for employers to address hiring biases, according to the draft National Autism Strategy.
In a decision sure to catch the eye of service providers using rostering apps to keep workers at arm's length, the FWC has found that a home care worker who signed two documents describing her as an independent contractor is in fact an employee capable of suing her employer for unlawful dismissal.
The law firm whose advocacy helped spur the FWC to consider regulating paid agents has called for improved "referral pathways" that steer workers contesting their dismissals towards pro bono clearing houses, Legal Aid and the community legal sector.
An experienced former employer-clientele lawyer turned HR manager has suggested that one way of discouraging paid agents from pursuing "unwinnable" cases is to introduce a "threshold" settlement amount below which they cannot charge clients for their services.
The FWC should look to the South Australian paid agent model because its registration criteria and disciplinary powers for code of conduct breaches are superior to the Western Australian system, the WA IRC's registrar says in a submission to the FWC's consultation on options to rein in "challenging paid agent conduct".
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.
