In a decision sure to catch the eye of service providers using rostering apps to keep workers at arm's length, the FWC has found that a home care worker who signed two documents describing her as an independent contractor is in fact an employee capable of suing her employer for unlawful dismissal.
An employer supplying well workers for offshore gas operations in the Bass Strait was entitled to stand down most of them when Esso suspended their services during industrial action, but the FWC has made a preliminary finding that a small yet "significant" portion might have been unauthorised.
The FWC has expressed dismay at a large aged care employer's "shift bidding" system in which it offers part-time workers extra hours only at ordinary pay, recommending instead that each employee get a chance to cap how many such shifts they are prepared to work without receiving overtime rates.
Former Qantas ground crew seeking compensation for their unlawful sacking in 2020 will have to wait at least two more months after parties presented the trial judge with competing views about the cohort's continuing employment prospects.
Union support has not proved enough for a clutch of CBA workers to have their zombie AWAs extended, after a FWC full bench accepted the bank's efforts to ameloriate any losses arising from transferring to its existing enterprise agreement.
A Newcastle-based church unfairly summarily dismissed a worker when it took the view that no-one vaccinated against COVID-19 could work for it because it viewed the inoculation as "the world's largest ever untested medical experiment", and retrospectively applied the policy to the worker without warning.
The MEU has lodged the second application to test the Closing Loopholes "same job, same pay" changes, this time aiming to lift the pay of Programmed labour hire workers at a NSW coal mine by $30,000 to $40,000, with many more claims planned.
The SDA has strongly defended its tying of bargained pay rises to the FWC's annual safety net rises, pointing to inflation-beating increases over the past seven years enjoyed by 100,000 Coles workers, as voting opens today on the retailer's proposed four-year deal in the face of a RAFFWU campaign to reject it.
The High Court will consider whether employers' duty of care and consequent exposure to damages extends to providing "safe" disciplinary and dismissal processes that protect sacked workers from psychiatric injury.