The Fair Work Ombudsman is taking a labour hire company to court for unlawfully deducting $500 fines from migrant workers' pay when they breached its drug and alcohol policy.
Maurice Blackburn's head of employment and industrial law, Josh Bornstein, says he has written a book challenging employers' increasing suppression of free speech to highlight "a major flaw in our democracy" and "a major threat" to workers' rights.
The FWC has upheld a law firm's dismissal of a solicitor accused of "gaming" its timekeeping system to boost a junior colleague's billable hours and telling an opposing practitioner his client was a "c-nt".
The FWC has backed the Commonwealth Bank's sacking of an "insubordinate" worker who argued it could not discipline him for pummelling his manager with abusive text messages because he sent them outside of working hours.
In a case that weighs up employer rights when conducting investigations under commonly-used agreement provisions, a FWC full bench has rejected a worker's request for an investigation report that details his alleged misconduct, but has suggested the employer re-open its probe because it denied him natural justice.
An organisation that supports members of the Stolen Generation did not have a reasonable basis for dismissing a worker for alleged "cultural insensitivity", but other conduct would have justified her sacking if it followed a proper process, the FWC has ruled.
A worker's "unfortunate" comment to the FWC that "it is nearly impossible to injure someone when driving a forklift at 8km/h", demonstrating his "unsatisfactory understanding of workplace safety", has clinched a ruling that upheld his sacking, after he admitted to smoking marijuana the night before a collision.
A supervisor's criticism of management in a social media group chat that "incit[ed] a negative and combative environment among the team", along with performance issues, provided a valid basis for dismissing her, the FWC has found.
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.
In what stands as a forensic analysis of disciplinary process failings, a judge in a near-300-page judgment has found that a construction giant took adverse action against a senior manager when it sacked him for allegedly intimidating property owners while partying during the 2020 bushfire recovery effort.
