Individual contracts page 13 of 13

The Federal Court has refused to reinstate a sales consultant pending the hearing of his wrongful dismissal claim, finding that his relationship with his former employer had broken down and that damages would be an adequate remedy if he ended up winning his case.

A court has found it seriously arguable that a contractual clause was reasonable in restraining a Fairfax executive from working for a competitor for six months, but refused to order him to comply because the publisher was slow to enforce it and because he had given undertakings not to poach clients or use his former employer's confidential information.

An executive must pay his former employer more than half a million dollars for fiduciary and contractual breaches, after the NSW Supreme Court upheld the reasonableness of a contract clause restraining him from working for another advertising agency for six months anywhere in Australia after his employment ended.

In one of the most significant employment law cases in the last hundred years, a former Commonwealth Bank executive asked the High Court on Monday to balance the "ledger" by recognising the existence of an implied term of trust and confidence in all Australian employment contracts, while the bank warned it against adopting English law.

In another chapter of a long-running case involving a botched attempt to lodge AWAs, a former company director will have the penalty for her role in short-changing 33 call centre workers reduced after the Federal Court cut in half the period in which she was liable as an accessory to her company's breaches.

A court has today delivered a "wake-up call" to Toyota Material Handling and its HR department for breaches of IR laws that included making a false declaration to the Fair Work Ombudsman, drawing to a close five years of litigation that included a full Federal Court ruling on a time limit that had threatened to derail the case.

Jetstar unlawfully deducted training costs from the wages of cadet pilots, despite warnings against doing so from its external IR consultant and its head of flying operations, the Federal Court has revealed in a penalty judgment today.