The Federal Court has slugged a wharfie almost $10,000 for telling a colleague "You'll end up dead dog" if he kept escorting on-hire workers through a lawful picket during a strike at Fremantle port in 2021.
A café owner who kissed a married 23-year-old employee on the mouth as she washed dishes has been ordered to pay $90,000 in damages and penalties, in the first concluded workplace s-xual harassment case under 2023 amendments to the Fair Work Act.
A court has fined Woolworths $233,250 for denying three part-time employees standard rosters, guaranteed hours and overtime pay, citing a lack of evidence "at the corporate mind level" and awarding the full sum to the AMIEU to encourage its enforcement work.
A judge has flagged compensation of more than $600,000 for a former St Vincent de Paul Society senior manager unlawfully sacked following a "sham" HR probe, but declined to award more after finding she misled the court and exaggerated her incapacity.
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.
An employer that underpaid an IT specialist it treated as a contractor for 14 years should have addressed the "uncertainty" involved, but its misdeeds nevertheless fell at "the lower end of the seriousness spectrum", a court has found in a penalty ruling.
An underpaying café owner who claims to hold a law degree has for the second time run afoul of a court during proceedings involving the FWO, with a judge deciding to again refer her to a legal profession regulator after finding it "difficult to reconcile" her supposed qualifications with the tenor of her oral and written submissions.
The implications of the Federal Court's retail underpayments decision are only starting to be understood, with employment law academic Andrew Stewart warning of the significent consequences of its redefinition of employer record-keeping obligations and findings on proving workers' agreement to vary award conditions.
The workplace watchdog's power to hold franchisors to account for franchisees' underpayments has been bolstered, after a full Federal Court today threw out a challenge by the Bakers Delight chain.
