A business that "outgrew" its informal HR processes got its fingers burnt when a young employee's welfare became endangered by its tolerance of the escalating misconduct of a worker who threatened to give him "the Ivan Milat treatment", the FWC has found.
The "obvious impracticability" of sanitising a koala helped to justify a pandemic-affected wildlife sanctuary's decision to make redundant a worker responsible for co-ordinating photographs of visitors holding its main attraction, the FWC has found.
The FWC has allowed a worker to proceed with her unfair dismissal case after it found that counting the employer's director and company secretary lifted numbers above the 15-employee threshold that excludes small businesses.
A senior FWC member has declined to recuse himself from hearing an unfair dismissal case brought by a disbarred lawyer who accused him of "blatant bias" and having a "sweet little racket" bullying unrepresented workers.
The FWC has upheld Essential Energy's dismissal of a whistleblowing risk manager deemed unable to perform her job's inherent requirements after suffering PTSD and taking extended leave following a finding that she breached its code of conduct.
The AAT has overruled the Attorney-General's Department's refusal to make a FEG redundancy payment to a worker who claims she stayed on at the administrator's request to help with winding-down a failed company, but then had her retrenchment payout denied when employee numbers fell from 60 to below the eligibility threshold of 15.
The FWC has upheld the "scrupulously fair" sacking of a second-in-charge installation worker over multiple safety breaches, including some so fundamental he should not have needed training to prevent them.
Procedural flaws in a worker's summary dismissal on Melbourne Cup day did not outweigh the seriousness of having invited the theft of a company vehicle by leaving the keys in the ignition, the FWC has found.
An employer has won permission to have a legal representative defend an unfair dismissal case in the face of opposition from a sacked former employee who failed to disclose he is a highly-experienced lawyer disbarred after a conviction for s-xual assault.
An FWC presidential member has taken a swipe at a "misleading" state government website for wrongly convincing a public servant that the federal tribunal was the right forum in which to contest her dismissal.
