A former Indian High Commissioner who paid a live-in domestic worker $9 a day to keep his eight-bedroom Canberra home, after he arranged for her "posting" in Australia for the "reception and entertainment of guests", has been ordered to pay more than $130,000 compensation.
DEWR spent almost $200,000 on external legal and financial advice to rectify about $60,100 in employee underpayments, it told a Senate Estimates hearing yesterday.
Large corporates and universities accounted for almost two-thirds of the $509 million in unpaid wages and entitlements recovered by the FWO in 2022-23 on behalf of more than 250,000 workers, the workplace watchdog revealed today.
The FWO is prosecuting franchisor Bakers Delight for failing to prevent its franchisees from underpaying workers, after the head office discovered the wage theft and failed to address it.
The SDA has hit a major hurdle in its efforts to expand upon an underpayments court victory, the FWC refusing to order Aldi to provide six years of rosters, pay records and timesheets for almost 13,000 employees the union claims might have been shortchanged for work performed outside their shifts.
A court has limited to about $100,000 the fines it has imposed on an underpaying, now-shuttered labour hire company after accepting that it unintentionally broke the law and that its embarrassed founder is "appropriately remorseful".
The CFMMEU's mining and energy division is taking credit for BHP's revelation today that it will have to backpay almost 30,000 workers in its Australian operations it has shortchanged since 2010, with its share set to cost it $431 million.
Underpaying employers could face fines of more than $4 million or three times the sum involved, while individuals such as directors and HR managers could face imprisonment and penalties up to $825,000 per breach under further wage theft reforms being considered by the Albanese Government.
A dumpling chain's HR manager was knowingly concerned in its Fair Work Act contraventions and "did not simply act as a conduit", the Federal Court has held in a liability judgment, finding she also instructed and trained a colleague in a payroll scam using both accurate and inaccurate records.
The FSU has launched a Federal Court test case against NAB over alleged unreasonable additional working hours in what the union warns is "just the start" for the industry.
