A court has found a husband and wife who performed largely home-based clerical work exclusively for one business before their services were further outsourced were employees rather than contractors because the company had an "undoubted authority to control" the relationship.
A cleaner who invoiced as both a sole trader and a company but claims he was an employee is pursuing Woolworths and three contracting businesses for more than $300,000 in underpaid wages and unpaid overtime, annual leave and superannuation he says he should have been paid between 2004 and 2015.
Twenty-year jail terms for industrial manslaughter and the newly-created role of WHS Prosecutor are among legislative changes contained in a bill introduced to Queensland Parliament yesterday.
An employer who refused requests by police and an OHS inspector to allow two CFMEU officials onto her building site to investigate a Facebook-notified safety issue has avoided an $18,500 penalty because the union's notice of entry did not include the officials' middle names.
The National Farmers' Federation will argue the FWO has misconstrued the horticulture award's piecework provisions in a Federal Court case it believes has the potential to remove much of the incentive to work across the entire sector.
The owners of a Coffee Club café franchise have been fined more than $180,000 for taking advantage of a desperate 457 skilled visa worker who they first refused to pay and then forced to hand back $18,000 under threat of ending his sponsorship.
The Federal Court has ordered former HSU national secretary and ex-Federal Labor MP Craig Thomson's employer – a company allegedly run by his wife – to make fortnightly deductions for the payment of $175,550 in legal costs owed to the FWC.
The FWC has called on employers to introduce a greater range of disciplinary options like fines and unpaid suspensions into agreements to avoid "inappropriately lenient or inappropriately harsh" responses to misconduct that are problematic for all parties concerned.
A full Federal Court has described as "astounding" a CFMEU argument that it should not be held liable for organisers' unauthorised entries to building sites because the alleged contraventions should be viewed as an exercise of "power", rather than of a "right" defined by the Fair Work Act.
The Federal Court has imposed a $2,500 fine on CFMEU construction and general division national secretary Dave Noonan, over unlawful conduct that halted work at Perth's $1.2 billion children's hospital project in 2013.
