Artificial intelligence HR and hiring tools pose "significant risks" for workplaces, according to an equality law expert who is calling for an enforceable positive duty on employers, while a recruitment body has told a Senate inquiry there should be an industry standard.
A group of DP World wharfies unfairly sacked for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 have failed to knock out a decision not to reinstate them, leaving a question hanging around the lawfulness of their employer's actions.
The FWC has lashed a HR consultant's "astonishingly poor" advice as contributing to the unfair dismissal of a long-serving manager whose redundancy process descended into accusations of serious misconduct, in part because of a mistaken belief that he emailed malware to his former employer.
Sydney University will not have to reinstate a lecturer sacked five years ago for superimposing a swastika on an image of an Israeli flag, after a full Federal Court majority found he could not prove that his "incendiary" conduct fell under intellectual freedom protections.
The FWC has extended time for a worker with "significant" mental health issues beyond the "ordinary stress" associated with most sackings, despite finding that representative error might also have contributed to the delay in filing her unfair dismissal case.
A supervisor's criticism of management in a social media group chat that "incit[ed] a negative and combative environment among the team", along with performance issues, provided a valid basis for dismissing her, the FWC has found.
The FWC has halved the redundancy payouts for two finance workers who stood in the way of their employer's attempt to find jobs with a competitor by declining its request for updated resumes.
The FWC has waved through a worker's late unfair dismissal application after accepting that it took seeing a job advertisement closely mirroring her role to crystallise doubts about whether she had genuinely been made redundant.
In a decision assessing how long a valid reason remains "current", the FWC has overlooked serious procedural deficiencies to back a landscaping business's summary sacking of a gardener almost two months after he called a colleague a "fat exploiter of foreigners".
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.
