The Albanese Government should pass reforms to make it easier for tens of thousands of Pacific and Timor-Leste workers participating in the PALM scheme to access their superannuation, potentially by having it paid out as wages, according to university researchers.
Working without a valid visa defeated a Costco employee's unfair dismissal claim, despite the necessary permit arriving within days of his sacking, the FWC has found.
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.
The Federal Court has imposed a record penalty on a sushi restaurant chain to "disabuse" employers of the notion that penalties for underpayments are "an acceptable cost of doing business" and recommended that the Fair Work Ombudsman refer its chief executive's potential flouting of tax and migration laws to the ATO, Department of Home Affairs and ASIC.
A massage business and its director must pay more than $2 million in fines and compensation after significantly short-changing temporary visa workers, subjecting them to a "cashback" scheme and threatening to kill their families if they blew the whistle.
The HR manager of a dumpling chain fined $4 million over a "deceitful and unscrupulous" payroll scam has been hit with a $100,000 penalty for her role, after the Federal Court heard a big sanction might force her to sell her share of her home.
A court has hit a former Indian High Commissioner with maximum fines for entrapping a worker in "powerless domestic servitude" in the guise of a diplomatic posting, paying her $9 daily to keep his palatial Canberra home 17.5 hours a day, seven days a week.
A former Indian High Commissioner who paid a live-in domestic worker $9 a day to keep his eight-bedroom Canberra home, after he arranged for her "posting" in Australia for the "reception and entertainment of guests", has been ordered to pay more than $130,000 compensation.
Unions NSW and human rights' groups are pushing for the Albanese Government to legislate an "ironclad guarantee" that migrant workers who report employer exploitation will not have their visas cancelled.
A court has limited to about $100,000 the fines it has imposed on an underpaying, now-shuttered labour hire company after accepting that it unintentionally broke the law and that its embarrassed founder is "appropriately remorseful".
