The Fair Work Act's compensation cap has operated inequitably to allow Guzman y Gomez to "benefit from its poor treatment" of a hard-working casual denied shifts while a HR manager maintained she remained employed, a senior FWC member has found.
A law firm that forced a solicitor to work "self-evidently excessive" hours and "deprived her of any form of personal autonomy or agency without any rational justification" has been ordered to pay her $50,000 in fines and interest.
The FWC has found it "fanciful" to suggest that an employer might allow a HR professional to send extensive confidential information to his personal email address without authorisation, ruling his serious misconduct warranted dismissal.
"Offboarding" a worker and processing her "final pay" before she went on holiday did not amount to a termination of employment, the FWC has ruled, because although the term "superficially" indicates dismissal, the worker failed to consider the circumstances of her labour-hire arrangement.
The FWC has rejected an individual bargaining representative's bid for an intractable bargaining declaration after finding negotiations with a major transport operator have merely "stalled" and are not yet at a stalemate.
A pregnant lawyer who filed her adverse action application before her dismissal took effect will get a chance to pursue her claim, after the FWC waived the "irregularity" to save both parties the cost and time involved in dealing with a fresh application that would have been filed late.
Queensland's Industrial Court has upheld a finding that an investigator's report and a lawyer's advice on a senior Office of IR employee's conduct attracted legal professional privilege and the employer did not waive it.
A casual Coles worker with limited availability has failed to overturn his sacking following a hiatus of more than three months, but the FWC says the store manager should have taken an additional step before dismissing him.
A listed gold producer has succeeded in halving a mine caretaker's redundancy pay after the FWC found that it trimmed the "uncomfortable" responsibilities in a proposed alternative role to the point where it almost mirrored his existing job.
Queensland Health has been ordered to backpay a nurse for an unpaid suspension imposed while investigating a complaint that he "grabbed" a patient's t-sticles in an attempt to revive them after they fainted while showering, a tribunal finding it failed to inform him that it took into account previous allegations of inappropriate behaviour.