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.
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.
Senior ABC managers failed to consult in-house IR and legal experts and "blithely ignored" risks when the organisation "capitulated" to critics and sacked presenter Antoinette Lattouf over her political views on the Gaza war, which warranted a substantial penalty to deter a recurrence, Federal Court judge Darryl Rangiah found today.
The Federal Court has today ordered the ABC to pay former presenter Antoinette Lattouf a fine of $150,000 for unlawfully sacking her for reasons including her political opinion opposing the Gaza war and breaching its enterprise agreement.
