The FWC has upheld the dismissal of a 63-year-old male employee who sent text messages calling a 37-year-old male colleague his "bitch" and "toy boy" and threatened to "molest" him and squeeze his testicles until it made him cry.
An experienced Qantas flight attendant who surreptitiously downed a quarter of a bottle of vodka on an 11-hour flight has failed to overturn her dismissal, with the FWC agreeing with the airline that she breached critical safety standards before trying to lie her way out of trouble.
The FWC has upheld the dismissal of a National Australia Bank employee for fraudulent lending practices, rejecting her assertion she had been made a "scapegoat" for the bank's Hayne Royal Commission woes.
The FWC has upheld fashion designer Alex Perry's dismissal of a long-serving patternmaker/sample machinist for threatening and intimidating behaviour towards his female colleagues, including an HR manager he described as "nothing".
An accounts officer who returned from leave to find her desk had been cleared has been awarded $7690 in compensation for her employer's "callous act" in making her redundant without any warning or consultation.
The FWC has lambasted an employer's outdated views on marriage after it sacked an IT specialist whose husband railed against its managing director via team messaging application Slack, but nonetheless slashed her payout by $56,000 on re-hearing her unfair dismissal application.
The FWC has halted the dismissal of an air traffic controller who in the space of two months assigned the wrong runway and "lost" separation of aircraft at Sydney Airport, finding that "questions of fact" around the employer's obligation to manage his performance needed to first be settled.
In a reminder to employers to double-check before assuming a worker has abandoned their employment, a business must pay $7000 to an ex-employee after it withdrew his visa sponsorship over an unexplained three-day absence that turned out to be GP-recommended stress leave.
There is "no place for bawdy offensive alpha-male behaviour in the workplace", the FWC has found, in upholding the dismissal of a male worker for asking a female colleague for a kiss and telling another co-worker that he wanted to "f-ck" his sister.
The FWC has sent employers a clear reminder of the conditions and processes required to justify summary dismissal, with its reinstatement of a contractor's employee who admitted to vomiting at a major client's after-hours function but denied propositioning one of its managers.
