An FWC member has declined to award costs to a prominent community legal centre's general manager despite finding she had been capriciously ousted by the management committee during a restructure and ordering her reinstatement.
CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood has been re-elected for another term after decisively knocking out challenger Amelio Sarchese for the third consecutive time, while the rest of the executive has been returned unopposed.
The FWC has ruled on the out-of-hours conduct of a maintenance worker who claimed he was acting in self-defence when he ended up in a fight after a "horsing-around" passer-by took his cowboy hat, leading to his expulsion from the giant Wheatstone LNG project.
In a decision further clarifying naming protocols for complaint and litigation respondents, a court has ruled that a law firm's individual partners need not be identified in a discrimination case brought by a former employee.
The FWC has upheld the sacking of a TAFE manager for preparing a false and misleading briefing note in a bid to exculpate himself from responsibility after becoming "caught up" in a training scam, and has rejected his submissions that the employer made him a scapegoat.
A union's liability for entry breaches by its officials has been underlined by a court hitting the CFMEU with a $200,000 fine for disrupting a concrete pour on a major rail project over alleged safety concerns.
A contested payslip and an unsigned employment contract obtained in "unusual" circumstances have persuaded the FWC that an ambassador's driver was unfairly dismissed after he informed the embassy he couldn't work for more than two hours at a time because of a sore back.
The FWC has refused to extend time for an unfair dismissal claim lodged five days late by a pro bono solicitor found to be "primarily responsible" for the delay, ruling that the worker knew the 21-day limit applied and should have followed it up with his representative.
An experienced meatworker's impulse to help out a stressed colleague without taking safety precautions prescribed by his employer's "cardinal rules" justified severing his employment, the FWC has found.
The FWO's costly pursuit of a cleaning company over inadvertent underpayments of $5200 over a nine-month period has drawn fire from a judge who questioned the "limited need for deterrence" in a case where Fair Work Act objectives could have been met through enforceable undertakings.
