The registered organisations branch of the FWC has unveiled a compliance and enforcement policy in which "common interests" such as cutting red tape are described as being at the "centre" of its regulatory approach.
A group of DP World wharfies unfairly sacked for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 have failed to knock out a decision not to reinstate them, leaving a question hanging around the lawfulness of their employer's actions.
The FWC has lashed a HR consultant's "astonishingly poor" advice as contributing to the unfair dismissal of a long-serving manager whose redundancy process descended into accusations of serious misconduct, in part because of a mistaken belief that he emailed malware to his former employer.
The FWC has extended time for a worker with "significant" mental health issues beyond the "ordinary stress" associated with most sackings, despite finding that representative error might also have contributed to the delay in filing her unfair dismissal case.
The SDA has failed to win bargaining orders against a beauty retailer that froze it out of negotiations for a new deal, after a FWC member had just an hour to weigh the application before voting ended and it won resounding support.
ASU officials will no longer have to be escorted to the bathroom when exercising entry rights at the ATO after the FWC found it an unreasonable request, while giving union delegates "time release" to accompany them would be "frankly quite ridiculous".
The FWC has halved the redundancy payouts for two finance workers who stood in the way of their employer's attempt to find jobs with a competitor by declining its request for updated resumes.
The FWC has waved through a worker's late unfair dismissal application after accepting that it took seeing a job advertisement closely mirroring her role to crystallise doubts about whether she had genuinely been made redundant.
In a decision assessing how long a valid reason remains "current", the FWC has overlooked serious procedural deficiencies to back a landscaping business's summary sacking of a gardener almost two months after he called a colleague a "fat exploiter of foreigners".
Mining giant Peabody has asked the High Court to weigh in on the "critical question" of when redundancies can be considered genuine and the extent of FWC powers to determine how employers might avoid job losses.
