Two retired contractors engaged for more than a decade to distribute material for a printing company have failed to convince a court that they were employees and should have been paid an award's hourly rate.
A court has taken an employer to task for making false representations to interns who were told their terms and conditions complied with minimum standards.
The High Court has today unanimously found that an employer breached the Fair Work Act's anti-sham contracting provisions when it misrepresented an employment relationship as one of independent contracting.
Queensland's Supreme Court has dismissed an accountant's claim that Clive Palmer verbally offered to pay him a $1 million annual salary for five years, finding instead that the accountant was correctly paid the $100,000 (later $150,000) a year agreed in written employment contracts.
A lingerie store manager allegedly labelled a "sl-t" after refusing the s-xual advances of a director at a work function was exposed to unlawful adverse action when the company refused to re-employ her, the Federal Circuit Court has found.
A chief executive has been awarded more than $3m after a court found that his employer's redundancy policy was incorporated into his contract of employment, but his off-sider will take home nothing after failing to prove that the policy became part of his contract as part of a "course of dealings".
A five-member bench of the Federal Court has ruled that a company was entitled to summarily dismiss an executive employee for serious misconduct that destroyed the relationship of trust between them, even though it had moved earlier to terminate his employment on six months' notice.
A state government that lost confidence in its mining warden did not breach his employment contract when it removed him from office, nor did it contravene trade practices laws when it originally offered him the role, a court has ruled.
Employee lawyers are reframing contract of employment claims to include a duty of good faith in the wake of the High Court rejecting an implied duty of trust and confidence, but face an uphill battle to entrench the principle in Australian law, according to some senior academics.
Stevedoring giant DP World was entitled to summarily dismiss an MUA delegate who called a colleague a "f--king lagger" and instructed another worker to lie in a related investigation, and the sacking did not amount to adverse action, the Federal Court has ruled today.
