In a significant decision acknowledging the "scarce" guidance on compulsory workplace COVID-19 vaccinations, the FWC has upheld a big employer's dismissal of a childcare worker for refusing to take a free flu shot.
The FWC has criticised a company's "entirely unjust" process in sacking a long-serving mushroom picker for misplacing a knife, while noting her prior unblemished disciplinary record contrasted strangely with a swathe of warnings following a workplace injury.
The FWC has cautioned against parties assuming they have a common understanding of notions like "usual terms" and "mutual release" in settlement agreements, after an accountant decided to proceed with her unfair dismissal case following apparently successful conciliation.
The FWC has ordered the reinstatement of a bank manager who transferred $37,500 to a fraudster's account in the frenzied early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A detention centre guard who tackled an escaping detainee has failed to win permission to appeal his sacking, a FWC bench rejecting his claim that it was in the public interest because he'd saved the community "from a disastrous 'what may have been'".
A teacher has failed to suppress a recent ruling likening his unfair dismissal claim to the interminable case at the centre of Charles Dickens' acerbic Bleak House.
A "very junior" lawyer who earned $1 million in his first three years at a firm has won more than $185,000 in compensation and penalties after he claimed it dismissed him for making almost 250 complaints.
The FWC will allow multinational cereal giant Sanitarium to lawyer-up to defend two unfair dismissal claims, noting it is "stressful enough" for an HR manager to be a witness without also representing the company, while its membership of an employer group is irrelevant.
A barrage of "thuggish" texts sent by the partner of a worker alleging harassment and bullying did not justify her dismissal, the FWC has found, describing the employer's attempt to vacuum-seal its investigation of her claims as both unreasonable and unrealistic.
