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.
A judge has rejected a former employee's $2 million-plus compensation claim after finding her unlawful sacking was not "the cause or even a material contributing cause" of an alleged psychological injury and that she would have lost her job anyway within months.
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.
A federal court judge has ordered a contractor and a customer to pay an employee $116,000 in compensation and penalties for targeting him with "h-mophobic and s-xualised statements", in "a very serious example of s-xual harassment at work".
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 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.
