The ETU is anticipating multiple backpay claims on behalf of thousands of labour hire and FIFO workers at resource, electrical supply and construction companies across Australia as part of a new campaign seeking to challenge their classification as casuals.
An accounts officer who returned from leave to find her desk had been cleared has been awarded $7690 in compensation for her employer's "callous act" in making her redundant without any warning or consultation.
The FWC has lambasted an employer's outdated views on marriage after it sacked an IT specialist whose husband railed against its managing director via team messaging application Slack, but nonetheless slashed her payout by $56,000 on re-hearing her unfair dismissal application.
The FWC has halted the dismissal of an air traffic controller who in the space of two months assigned the wrong runway and "lost" separation of aircraft at Sydney Airport, finding that "questions of fact" around the employer's obligation to manage his performance needed to first be settled.
A Parmalat worker's compensation and injury manager is seeking reinstatement and maximum penalties against her former employer, alleging the dairy giant took adverse action by sacking her for repeatedly complaining to and about its national health and safety manager.
In a reminder to employers to double-check before assuming a worker has abandoned their employment, a business must pay $7000 to an ex-employee after it withdrew his visa sponsorship over an unexplained three-day absence that turned out to be GP-recommended stress leave.
The first female secretary of SA's firefighters' union says that claims in an Equal Opportunity report that the service is a "boys club" and that the UFU is an impediment to change do not reflect the actions or priorities of the organisation's new guard nor the members that voted it in.
There is "no place for bawdy offensive alpha-male behaviour in the workplace", the FWC has found, in upholding the dismissal of a male worker for asking a female colleague for a kiss and telling another co-worker that he wanted to "f-ck" his sister.
An FWC full bench has given a mental health service volunteer another shot at applying for anti-bullying orders after quashing a finding that, because he was participating in a government-funded program to improve his wellbeing, he was not a "worker" according to the federal WHS Act.
