In a judgment confirming workers can seek to recoup underpayments through the Consumer Law, the Federal Court has found Domino's responsible for short-changing workers by misleading no fewer than 300 franchise operators into applying old SDA-negotiated agreements instead of the award.
Aldi will be obliged to pay $26.3 million on top of $28.9 million it has already restored to 32,000 current and former workers it allegedly failed to pay for work before and after their shifts, under the proposed terms for settlement of a SDA class action, according to the union.
The Albanese Government has today revealed that it will introduce a new criminal offence for companies that fail to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains.
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.
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.
