In a first for the Fair Work Act's new road transport contractor regime, the FWC has ordered a courier company to enter into a new services contract with a parcel delivery driver after finding it "unwittingly" and unfairly terminated her previous one.
A former ANZ executive found to be "persona non grata" in the industry has been cleared to recover millions in bonuses withheld after his sacking for sending lewd messages, but has otherwise failed in his six-year-long case to win whistleblower protections or sustain arguments that the bank took unlawful adverse action.
The FWC has found that an engineer's "extremely insulting" WhatsApp messages about his manager, sent to colleagues on a day off, warranted his summary sacking, while nevertheless awarding him $14,000 compensation because the employer denied him a chance to explain.
Uber's business model has withstood scrutiny in the first test under the Fair Work Act's new unfair contracts provisions to probe its use of the same "cab rank principle" that applies to barristers.
A self-represented "drive in/drive out" adult entertainer has become the first to successfully test the FWC's new unfair contract powers, knocking out a term requiring her to forfeit all wages and commissions when she left an 1830-kilometre pub circuit due to safety concerns.
A project manager who argued that putting a Ferrari badge on a Toyota "doesn't make it a Ferrari" can pursue an adverse action case after the FWC found his employer labelled him an independent contractor merely to facilitate his request for his pay to go into a trust account.
An insolvent NT "space base" has been ordered to pay $2.3 million to its former chief executive, ousted shortly before NASA launched three commercial rockets from its Cape York site.
The Federal Circuit and Family Court has rejected a bid by the former chief operations officer of a technology start-up incubator to use its small claims jurisdiction to boost his employee incentive scheme payment by $85,500.
The FWC has found that an employee of an Australian company who lives and works in New Zealand can bring an unfair dismissal claim, because the employer received his emailed contract acceptance in Victoria.
Workers should not think that independent contractors operate in some "unbridled utopia, free from all direction and control", a senior FWC member has observed in tossing out a psychologist's general protections case.
