A one-time star employee's anti-bullying application has been rejected despite acknowledgment of his "devastation" at being placed on successive performance improvement plans he believed resulted from unfair interpretations of his position description.
The Registered Organisations Commission has initiated a prosecution of the AWU's Victorian branch and its former secretary, Cesar Melhem, for allegedly failing to remove 2,000 unfinancial members from the books over a five-year period through to 2013.
The FWC has found that a hairdresser who both quit and was told she was fired during a bizarre late-night Facebook Messenger exchange was in fact unfairly dismissed, with the FWC observing there was no reason for it beyond the salon owner's "conspiracy theory".
The FWC has found it reasonably arguable that the NUW is involved in a coordinated approach to involve itself in bargaining at Linfox despite being ineligible to represent its tanker drivers, issuing production orders regarding a non-Linfox NUW delegate who seeks to be a bargaining representative.
Virgin Australia can use pilots' entire final pay to meet increasing costs of training new recruits if they leave within three years, under a domestic pilots' agreement that the FWC has approved despite finding it "likely" that the clause is not a permitted deduction.
In a significant decision on the FWC's power to deal with clashes between agreements and state laws, a tribunal member has found that jurisdiction was established by a combination of health and safety considerations and the absence of legislative reference to exclusive arbitrators.
Uber has repelled another attempt to establish that it is an employer, despite the FWC finding that a driver's relationship with the ride-sharing business was of "some magnitude".
In a significant addition to the jurisprudence around "arrangements" between transferring businesses, the FWC has rejected union arguments that the urgent use of an old employer's pathology equipment after a midnight handover should lead to continuing employees being retained on their existing, more generous enterprise agreement.
In upholding the dismissal on medical grounds of a prison officer who was later declared fit, the FWC has noted his union gained permission to obtain a second opinion but also assisted him in making an ill-fated decision not to pursue it until after his termination.
