The FWC has upheld a Qube subsidiary's sacking of a truck driver who blamed a positive blood alcohol reading on sucking on three-quarters of a 10-pack of Anticol cough lozenges to counter a dry throat.
FWC Deputy President Gerard Boyce has again run afoul of a tribunal bench, which has reminded him that conduct months after a dismissal cannot be considered when deciding whether an employer has a valid reason.
The FWC has refused to permit the Commonwealth Bank to bring in external lawyers to help it defend an unrepresented worker's unfair dismissal claim, despite the bank claiming its team of eight in-house employment solicitors are either unavailable or lacking recent experience.
After a forensic journey through an office's coffee habits, the FWC has upheld the sacking of a worker who used her employer's café account for clients to finance her caffeine habit.
Victoria Police has lost its bid to sack an officer for "disgraceful conduct" in allegedly exposing himself to a day spa therapist while getting his groin waxed, the State's Court of Appeal this month holding its review board rightly set the dismissal decision aside.
In a decision exploring when employers can be said to have repudiated employment contracts, the FWC has ruled that a multinational dismissed a worker when it "unilaterally" withdrew his company car without compensation following a collision with a kangaroo.
A government agency has been ordered to reinstate a worker dismissed a year after it attributed a workplace vehicle collision to "human error", the FWC finding it had produced no further evidence to warrant the change of heart.
The FWC has reinstated a bacon worker, after holding it was not threatening to say she felt like knocking a colleague off her perch, while finding the employer contributed to their stress, denied her procedural fairness and had a tendency to exaggerate evidence.
The FWC has upheld the sacking of a traffic management supervisor who allegedly directed his union representative to ask for $50,000 to "go away quietly" after the employment relationship was soured by his refusal to be on-call on weekends.
A full bench has overturned an extension of time, originally granted on the basis of his union's representative error, for a truck driver summarily sacked by Coles Supermarkets after testing positive for methamphetamine and cannabinoids.
