In a case clarifying when employers must make redundancy payments, the Federal Court has rejected claims by Spotless Services Australia Ltd that it was not obliged to pay severance to three Perth International Airport workers due to an exemption for ordinary and customary turnover of labour.
A senior FWC member has held that an abusive "alt-right" employer unfairly sacked an apprentice for refusing to assist his pursuit of revenge against a former employee, describing the company managing director as having the most deplorable attitude to HR management she had ever encountered.
An employer who sought to "retrofit" a requirement for workers to have a clean police record should have obtained external HR advice to avoid unfairly sacking a storeworker over his criminal past, the FWC has found.
Armaguard has been ordered to reinstate two security guards sacked for their part in a "string of failures" that resulted in almost $60,000 cash being stolen, the FWC finding that the company failed to take into account numerous mitigating circumstances.
A supervisor at Gina Rinehart's Roy Hill iron ore mine claims the company sacked him for making complaints and inquiries about his employment, at one point allegedly interviewing a former colleague he'd accused of assaulting him in an attempt to "dig up dirt".
The FWC has praised the "extraordinary lengths" an employer took to support a worker suffering from domestic violence before it sacked her for failing to improve her attendance.
Westpac was entitled to dismiss a premium client manager for putting customer service ahead of protecting their personal information when he loaned his allegedly troublesome work phone to a visiting relative and used his private Gmail account as a workaround for the bank's "slow" internal email system, the FWC has found.
The FWC has ordered an employment agency to pay 26 weeks' wages in compensation to a job placement officer it sacked for failing to declare convictions for Centrelink fraud, the tribunal criticising an HR manager's handling of the process while pouring water on claims that a clean record was an "inherent requirement" of her job.
An HR manager's "unnecessary allegations" and "overreach" have contributed to a finding that although a drug and alcohol tester's failure to declare he was taking Nurofen Plus provided a valid reason for dismissal, his sacking was unfair.
The FWC on a rehearing has taken a different view of a beach inspector's claims that a supervisor authorised him to modify council cars, but found deficiencies with his employer's response that were "difficult to comprehend" given its HR expertise.
