A senior FWC member has taken aim at a union for exhuming a member's five-year-old allowance grievance, observing that it risked its reputation by unenthusiastically pursuing such a "stale" and "obviously flawed" case.
In a significant decision on FWO investigative powers under recent laws stiffening protections for vulnerable workers, the Federal Court has rejected a franchisor's bid to have declared void a notice to produce documents created before the legislation came into force.
Days before SA's largest private employer is due to defend a class action on behalf of thousands of its convenience store workers, a tribunal has in awarding almost $65,000 in penalties to an underpaid console operator found it still at risk of non-compliance.
The NTEU says it is preparing a "wave of class actions" and will "open the rule book" in pursuing other avenues to recover millions of dollars in underpayments on behalf of highly casualised university employees.
The FWO has confirmed it is now investigating three universities after the University of Sydney became the latest to reveal multimillion-dollar underpayments, while the NTEU blames mass casualisation for creating the conditions for "wage theft".
While ordering BP to pay more than $200,000 compensation to a reinstated worker who made a Hitler parody video of its protracted bargaining with oil refinery workers, an FWC full bench has allowed it to reduce his bonus and revoke a promotion.
The FWO's pursuit of penalties over a crew's "sit-in" on a decommissioned trading vessel has been potentially scuppered by a Federal Court finding that they were not covered by an agreement at the time.
The Reserve Bank must reinstate a senior network engineer who accidentally posted to a WhatsApp workplace group a racist message meant for his wife, the FWC finding its procedural failings despite HR expertise to be "simply inexplicable".
A business operator forced to choose between retaining an employee or maintaining his relationship with his wife must pay six months lost remuneration after failing to convince the FWC that dismissing his national sales manager was a case of genuine redundancy.
