An experienced meatworker's impulse to help out a stressed colleague without taking safety precautions prescribed by his employer's "cardinal rules" justified severing his employment, the FWC has found.
An Uber driver's failure to convince the FWC that he is an employee is unlikely to deter other challenges according to an academic, while the case raises questions as to whether traditional legal tests can be applied to the gig economy.
The FWC has opened the way for an on-hire casual employee to challenge his dismissal, after rejecting a labour hire company's jurisdictional objection that he could have no reasonable expectation of continuing employment, or was engaged for a specified task which came to an end.
The FWC has acceded to a request to delay an unfair dismissal hearing for two AMWU delegates sacked by Visy Board for allegedly organising unlawful overtime bans, so that they don't prejudice their position in a parallel civil penalty prosecution the company has initiated against the union, an official and 69 employees.
A home-based sales representative has been compensated after the FWC found that he was sacked within a day of receiving a "manifestly unreasonable" ultimatum to pack up his life in Byron Bay and return to work in his employer's Sydney office.
The FWC has upheld the sacking of a group training company's trainer for falsifying his timesheets, but has upbraided the employer for failing to give the worker enough time to study the complex allegations against him.
A Rio Tinto employee has been reinstated after the FWC highlighted starkly different recommendations in investigations conducted by its HR and safety experts.
The FWC has upheld a building company's sacking of a safety officer who insisted his job was limited to an advisory capacity despite repeated warnings that he was to rigorously enforce safety across sites.
The FWC has reinstated a public bus driver dismissed after a road rage incident in which a vehicle was damaged and punches thrown, the commissioner observing that while the employee-employer relationship was "bruised", it was not beyond repair.
An operations director who claimed a biotech giant offered her a job "until retirement" has failed to establish that it engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct or that it took adverse action by retrenching her the following year.