Legal page 545 of 570

Anti-bullying order restricts worker's exercise regime; Adult retail worker pay rates to stay; ILO challenge to Tasmanian IR legislation; and Federal government pilots new training programs.

A major IT company had a valid reason to sack a project manager who wrongly claimed overnight expenses on 141 occasions over less than 12 months, but his dismissal was unfair given his long and otherwise unblemished service and the long delay in investigating the misconduct, the Fair Work Commission has ruled.

The Federal Court has fined the HSU and three former Victorian officials a total of nearly $68,000 for financial governance irregularities, and, in a first under registered organisations legislation, ordered one of them to repay the union more than $26,000.

Tasmania's Hodgman Government has introduced draft legislation for its proposal to impose a 12-month freeze on the wages and incremental increases of the state's 24,000 public servants and remove the State IRC's power to award future pay increases above a 2% Government-set cap.

The Fair Work Commission has granted a company's request for good faith bargaining orders to provide for separate negotiations over four agreements in one case, but has knocked back a union's application for orders in another after finding that the employer was entitled to take a "hard" position in discussions.

Small business owners approach the Fair Work Act's modern awards with a mixture of dread and resignation, according to a new report.

The Federal Circuit Court has awarded a long-distance bus driver $13,000 after rejecting his employer's argument that he was employed to work shifts rather than calendar days and therefore not entitled to a living away from home allowance.

The High Court has reserved its decision on whether BHP Coal fell foul of the Fair Work Act's adverse action provisions by sacking a worker for breaching its workplace conduct policy after he held up an anti-"scab" sign at a picket.

The Abbott Government this morning introduced a Bill in the House of Representatives to cap redundancy payments under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee scheme at a maximum of 16 weeks, describing the current benefits for employees of insolvent companies as "overly generous" and as creating a "moral hazard".

A Federal Court full bench has overturned a lower court's interpretation of an employment contract, finding that it had wrongly taken account of the parties' conduct after it commenced.