The AWU has warned that Woodside's HR team faces a "learning curve" after the union yesterday won a hard-fought majority support determination forcing the energy giant to the negotiating table with its offshore platform employees for the first time in more than three decades.
The FWC has lamented the "failings" of an IR advisory business that wrongly told an on-hire worker to bring his general protections claim against his host employer.
The FWC has declared after eight unfair dismissal applications and 24 matters in total over two years that it will no longer entertain a persistent worker's quest for satisfaction through the tribunal.
An employer that used the wrong company name in its bargaining notice has failed to convince the FWC that it amounted to a minor procedural or technical error that it should overlook when considering whether to approve its agreement.
A big employer's failure to give union representatives a "heads up" that it would impose a vaccination mandate did not necessarily render its subsequent dismissal of 25 workers unfair, the FWC has found.
A listed company's "extraordinary" admission that it failed to correct workers who mistakenly believed they had to be union members to negotiate a deal has torpedoed its bid to terminate its agreement.
The FWC has compensated a worker sacked for making "racist" comments, finding her employer's handling of her dismissal "appalling" and that it had been "very unfair to label her a racist person".
In what it claims is its first litigation seeking to have a holding company found responsible for its subsidiaries' breaches, the FWO has initiated court action against ASX-listed Super Retail Group for self-reported underpayments of more than $1 million that led to an internal audit and backpayments exceeding $50 million that the watchdog says remain short of the mark.
The FWC has reinstated a mineworker sacked by a Yancoal subsidiary for aggressive and threatening behaviour in which he threatened to cut a co-worker's throat, finding the dismissal harsh because of his unblemished 12-year tenure, his remorse and his PTSD.
In finding a worker with an oral contract an independent contractor, the FWC has affirmed that the principles of Personnel Contracting apply whether the contract is written, oral or some combination and has suggested that the previously-used "multifactorial approach" didn't necessarily cause "chaos", but created "legal and commercial uncertainty".
