Mining giant Peabody has asked the High Court to weigh in on the "critical question" of when redundancies can be considered genuine and the extent of FWC powers to determine how employers might avoid job losses.
The FWC has observed that an employer "is not a charity", in rejecting a claim from a former risk manager for an insolvent cryptocurrency trader that his award-covered role did not change despite successive $50,000 promotions over just 15 months.
A truck driver sacked without notice via a Saturday afternoon voicemail following the sale of his employer's business has won compensation, including a payment to cover the cost of "upskilling" his licence.
The Ai Group has told a Senate inquiry that the jobs transition plan in the Net Zero Bill currently before parliament "treads on very sensitive ground" when set against the established treatment of redundancies in Australia's IR framework.
The FWC has reduced the redundancy entitlements of five former employees of online trading platform Bartercard after they refused new positions requiring them to work exclusively from home and to fork out the full cost of setting up an appropriate space.
The FWC has "condemned" an employer for characterising its bid to redeploy a worker to a "substantially different role" as fulfilling its redundancy obligations and has refused to reduce his severance payment.
A full Federal Court has clarified the extent to which employers must investigate alternative roles for workers caught up in restructures, finding that a mining company had an obligation to assess whether employees could replace already-engaged contractors before making them redundant.
An employer has failed to convince the FWC that it should reduce a worker's redundancy payment from 13 weeks to six, finding that although it secured another job for him on the same pay, losing private use of a company car meant the role was not "substantially the same".
The FWC has awarded compensation to an accounts assistant who said she could not return to the office after working from home for almost a decade, while her employer maintained that the arrangement only began with the pandemic.
