A court has levied a fine of more than $270,000 on a company that made an employee work 180 unpaid hours as an intern, and has also imposed a $8160 fine and three-year injunction on its director, who was already bound by an enforceable undertaking.
The FWC has backed aluminium giant Alcoa's right under its new uniform policy to bar two employees at its WA alumina mines who are also AWU delegates from wearing shirts that bear the union's logo in the workplace.
A straddle driver who lost his job as a result of an automation-driven restructure at Patrick Stevedores' Port Botany container terminal has won his job back after the FWC ruled his dismissal was not a genuine redundancy.
The FWC has decried the "normalisation" of a culture of lawlessness within the CFMEU, in decisions refusing two officials' applications for entry permits after they failed the "fit and proper person" test, but granting entry rights to another organiser who allegedly threatened to start a Boral-style "war" against a major construction company.
Unions will push for a legislated "no reduction principle" for penalty rates, in contrast to the Labor policy stance of having them decided by the Fair Work Commission.
Fortescue Metals Group has failed in a bid to block the CEPU from seeking a declaration that it unduly delayed entry to its WA branch secretary after a 2013 workplace fatality, with a court finding WA's non-harmonised OHS laws are no barrier to entering sites under the Fair Work Act.
The FWC has reinstated a senior clinician fired for making "ill-advised" jokes about her hospital director in email exchanges with her supervisor, after finding "the punishment did not fit the crime".
The FWC has rejected bullying allegations against Essential Energy's chief executive officer, but has ordered the company to accept voluntary redundancy applications from two employees who brought the anti-bullying claim because the cost of keeping them on the books when there is no meaningful work is "irrational, absurd and ridiculous".
Qantas Catering employees are obliged to "work with, buddy and train" labour hire employees to do the same work they perform, the Fair Work Commission has ruled.
