A FWC member who ordered a meatworker's reinstatement wrongly discounted as hearsay evidence that he allegedly called his Pacific Islander colleagues "tree apes" and "black c-nts", a full bench has found.
ASX-listed services giant Ventia has achieved a "complete metamorphosis" of a freshly-acquired company's agreement by varying its terms instead of making a new one, in an application that posed an "Aristotelian form and substance problem" for the FWC.
Australia's regulation of precarious workers is "world-leading" and we arguably have "the most progressive industrial relations legislation on the planet", but academics need to rebuild the IR discipline to address its erosion and the rise of human resource management, according to UNSW's Michael Quinlan.
The FWC has found that a major warehouse operator did not genuinely make a worker redundant, because it failed to discuss redeployment opportunities with her, including 18 jobs it had vacant at the time of her dismissal.
A court has refused to lift a short-term contractor's unpaid suspension while he runs an adverse action case against an employer that declined to make him permanent, finding incompetence might "at best" be to blame for its investigation delays, while any harm to his reputation is "self-inflicted".
A small business and its owner have been hit with fines, compensation and damages totalling more than $300,000 after the "deplorable" exploitation of a young worker with an intellectual disability who went almost two years without being paid.
A craft brewery owned by the Kathmandu founder's charity has failed to persuade the FWC that its future would be jeopardised by the time and potential financial impact involved in bargaining for its first enterprise agreement.
The FWC has slammed the brakes on planned protected industrial action by train drivers negotiating a new deal with Aurizon, finding their notification of an "indefinite" period spent attaching campaign stickers too vague.
In a significant decision on the FWC's arbitral powers, a full bench has provided further "clarification" of its ruling in a dispute after an employer "disobeyed" its finding that seven workers should be reclassified at a higher level.
