A court has awarded a professional employee almost $425,000 in damages for the repudiation of his employment contract by accountancy firm Crowe Horwath.
A CFMEU-backed class action brought against an employer for allegedly underpaying 150 workers more than $1 million for travel time stands to recast agreement wording on the precise location where a job begins and ends.
A court has found a husband and wife who performed largely home-based clerical work exclusively for one business before their services were further outsourced were employees rather than contractors because the company had an "undoubted authority to control" the relationship.
A cleaner who invoiced as both a sole trader and a company but claims he was an employee is pursuing Woolworths and three contracting businesses for more than $300,000 in underpaid wages and unpaid overtime, annual leave and superannuation he says he should have been paid between 2004 and 2015.
The FWC has accepted that BHP Billiton's sacking of a worker who raised his safety visor to get a better look at an exploding smelter at a uranium mine was justified but harsh, stopping short of reinstatement, though, because of the company's "rational" loss of trust and confidence in him.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has agreed to enter into mediation with an employee who accuses it of taking adverse action by suspending and demoting her and directing her to take indefinite leave following a long absence for cancer treatment and surgery.
The Federal Court will next week hold a preliminary hearing of allegations by a former Australia Post national workers' compensation manager that ex-chief executive Ahmed Fahour caved-in to a union leader's demands to oust him from his role and shelve his efforts to rein-in costs, or face protest rallies and the leaking of sensitive internal documents.
The High Court has reserved its decision on parallel appeals by Esso and the AWU questioning what constitutes a breach of bargaining orders and whether a breach during bargaining means future protected action is not possible.
A full Federal Court has found a ship's officer who quit the maritime industry after a bungled investigation into alleged bullying by her captain is entitled to a greater proportion of her costs, but rejected claims for more than $1.6 million in damages.
