A transgender senior law lecturer who claims his employer told him it was making him redundant due to COVID-19 is suing for alleged unlawful adverse action, sham redundancy and sex discrimination.
In an instructive decision on when employers should communicate major job-cutting proposals to workers, the FWC has endorsed Deakin University's timing but told it to engage at an institution-wide level after finding its 15-area carve-up left "no opportunity" for meaningful consultation.
An employer that made a worker redundant just days before the unveiling of JobKeeper must pay the remaining sum she would have gained as a recipient, after the FWC found a proper consultation process would have resulted in her getting it.
The "obvious impracticability" of sanitising a koala helped to justify a pandemic-affected wildlife sanctuary's decision to make redundant a worker responsible for co-ordinating photographs of visitors holding its main attraction, the FWC has found.
A senior FWC member has declined to recuse himself from hearing an unfair dismissal case brought by a disbarred lawyer who accused him of "blatant bias" and having a "sweet little racket" bullying unrepresented workers.
The AAT has overruled the Attorney-General's Department's refusal to make a FEG redundancy payment to a worker who claims she stayed on at the administrator's request to help with winding-down a failed company, but then had her retrenchment payout denied when employee numbers fell from 60 to below the eligibility threshold of 15.
The FWC has rejected a Tasmanian produce company's bid to avoid paying redundancy entitlements due to a "paucity" of evidence that it cannot pay and faces insolvency after a 100% coronavirus-related revenue hit.
A Full Federal Court has in rejecting a big employer's appeal of two rulings affirmed that a worker's reasonable expectation of ongoing employment helps determine their entitlement to redundancy payments.
A pandemic-affected employer has succeeded in having redundancy payments to four workers slashed by almost 70%, the FWC finding its perilous cash position and obligation to remaining employees outweighed the impact on the quartet.
