A tribunal has penalised the operator of a string of Adelaide massage parlours who said he refused to keep records and provide pay slips because he was "too busy and lazy".
The Federal Circuit Court has levelled a $75,000 fine and is expected to order more than $25,000 in compensation against the director of a liquidated supermarkets enterprise who withheld about $450,000 in union dues, superannuation and Easter rates from more than 200 employees.
The SA Labor Party has pledged to criminalise wage theft if it retains power at the state election on March 17, with the worst repeat offenders facing jail terms of up to 15 years.
Woolworths says it will train head contractors on their IR obligations, require all cleaning contractors to use a third-party payroll system and increase its auditing, after an FWO investigation revealed the retailer contributed to a culture of non-compliance in its Tasmanian cleaning supply chain.
In a decision sure to be closely analysed by employers, a court has ruled that a worker is entitled to accrued annual leave despite being paid a casual loading for 15 years.
The FWO's costly pursuit of a cleaning company over inadvertent underpayments of $5200 over a nine-month period has drawn fire from a judge who questioned the "limited need for deterrence" in a case where Fair Work Act objectives could have been met through enforceable undertakings.
An employer could face a ninefold increase in fines ordered by the Federal Circuit Court after the FWO successfully appealed the judgment on the basis that it wrongly grouped contraventions as a single course of action.
The ramifications of recent legislative changes requiring employers to disprove employees' records of hours worked in wage claim cases have been spelt out in a court decision imposing penalties of more than $120,000 on a company and its director for underpaying an apprentice.
The meatworkers' union has released an explosive "black market labour investigation" that accuses a meat processing company, a regional local government authority and labour suppliers of working together to exploit temporary migrants on working holiday visas rather than employ locals.
