In the first fully contested Federal Court case to consider new s-xual harassment protections in the Fair Work Act, a judge has relied heavily on a FIFO apprentice's dinnertime revelation to her parents that her supervisor asked her for a "bl-w job" to find he s-xually harassed her.
The Albanese Government should repeal the wage theft offence and focus on simplifying the workplace relations system, the Australian Industry Group has told a Senate inquiry, while ACCI says that the absence of prosecutions shows that the "crime wave" used to justify the legislation "was false and misleading".
The FWC's powers should be further extended to conciliate underpayment claims as a quicker, low-cost alternative to the courts, the ACTU has told a Senate wage theft inquiry.
A former FWO chief counsel-turned judge has taken an axe to the workplace regulator's belief in penalties as a general deterrent, expressing astonishment at its "staggering" pursuit of a $21,000 fine against an employer who quickly coughed up a $976 underpayment once a junior worker provided proof of their age.
The FWO is demonstrating an "appropriately cautious" approach to pursuing employers under new wage theft laws, the Closing Loopholes review has found, while a senator has separately told a parliamentary inquiry that the bar for prosecution might be too high.
A court has ordered the FWO to pay costs for its "very late" and unexplained abandonment of an underpayments case, while highlighting its failure to "grapple" with the case's underlying problems.
The FWC has acceded to BHP's request for it to bring almost 140 of its BHP OS on-hire workers in-house, to reduce the workload involved with managing multiple enterprise agreements and address "the potential for disharmony in the workforce".
In what the NTEU has called a "new low" in tertiary education sector underpayment cases, Torrens University is seeking permission from the High Court to challenge last month's full court finding that casual academics should be paid for marking assessments not directly related to particular lectures or tutorials.
A full Federal Court has confirmed that class actions cannot start until members are correctly identified but can "transmogrify", after Adero Law conceded the definition contained in a store managers' claim against The Reject Shop left the group "empty".
Adero Law says a class action accusing Kmart of failing to pay salaried managers for actual hours worked, including while at home, will test whether it has "adopted in practice" lessons drawn from underpayments cases targeting Coles and Woolworths.
