The FWC has ordered a small business owner to compensate his "disgruntled" ex-partner after finding she withdrew money from the company account in the context of their "deteriorating relationship", not as an employee wanting to damage the enterprise.
A MEU lodge president with an "extensive" disciplinary record has narrowly won his job back at a South32 coal mine, but not before having his backpay halved for failing to report the safety incident that led to his sacking.
The FWC has found it highly likely that a worker's Scottish accent contributed to her "this is sh*t" comment being misheard by her supervisor as "I quit", meaning the employer lacked a valid reason for her subsequent dismissal.
The FWC has reduced the redundancy entitlements of five former employees of online trading platform Bartercard after they refused new positions requiring them to work exclusively from home and to fork out the full cost of setting up an appropriate space.
The FWC has "condemned" an employer for characterising its bid to redeploy a worker to a "substantially different role" as fulfilling its redundancy obligations and has refused to reduce his severance payment.
In a decision warning that workplaces are "on notice" to meet far higher standards of behaviour, the FWC has thrown out the unfair dismissal claim of a veteran Alcoa worker held to have groped a female colleague.
A full Federal Court has clarified the extent to which employers must investigate alternative roles for workers caught up in restructures, finding that a mining company had an obligation to assess whether employees could replace already-engaged contractors before making them redundant.
The law firm whose advocacy helped spur the FWC to consider regulating paid agents has called for improved "referral pathways" that steer workers contesting their dismissals towards pro bono clearing houses, Legal Aid and the community legal sector.
An experienced former employer-clientele lawyer turned HR manager has suggested that one way of discouraging paid agents from pursuing "unwinnable" cases is to introduce a "threshold" settlement amount below which they cannot charge clients for their services.
