Five waterfront workers have been awarded a total of $120,000 in compensation for the emotional distress they suffered after the MUA named them in "scab posters" that had them fearing for their safety.
The Federal Circuit Court has fined construction company Baulderstone $25,000 for taking adverse action against a worker who resigned his CFMEU membership, along with $7000 in penalties for two HR managers who were carrying out orders and failed to "exercise their choice" to refuse to comply.
A manager with HR responsibilities who described herself as a "female Richard Branson or Warren Buffett" and falsified her credentials has failed to convince the Federal Circuit Court her employer took unlawful adverse action when it sacked her.
Esso Australia has locked out 200 maintenance workers at its Bass Strait oil and gas operations, in response to rolling stoppages by AMWU and ETU members.
Leighton has failed to knock out most of a manager's adverse action claim that alleges the construction giant made him redundant for complaining it failed to disclose a project's $205 million budget blowout and overstated its revenue by $1.4 billion.
The Federal Circuit Court has found a newspaper publisher took adverse action when it forced a full-time journalist to sign a take-it-or-leave it statement reducing him to two days a week - with unspecified entitlements to be paid in instalments - and sacked him when he complained.
A company's parental leave policy – which breached the NES by making unpaid parental leave only available to "primary" caregivers - has cost it $170,000 in the unpaid wages and redundancy pay that an employee would have received if he had been allowed to access the leave and its flow-on benefits.
A former university academic who unsuccessfully claimed she had been sexually harassed by two colleagues has been ordered to pay a $900,000 indemnity costs bill after the Federal Court found she rejected a "generous" settlement offer despite legal advice that she was unlikely to succeed.
Workers need to be protected from employers that argue they took action against an employee because of the impact of the person exercising a workplace right rather than the actual exercise of the right, a judge has ruled in a dissenting judgment.
The Federal Court has criticised the CFMEU for its "deplorable" approach to complying with the law, ordering it to pay a penalty of more than $100,000 for a series of breaches on a wind farm construction site and to stop interfering in the project.
