A shareholding employee sacked by his "toxic" family business for raising his voice at a salesperson has won compensation but missed out on reinstatement due in part to his court bid to wind up the company.
The FWC has upheld a law firm's dismissal of a solicitor accused of "gaming" its timekeeping system to boost a junior colleague's billable hours and telling an opposing practitioner his client was a "c-nt".
The FWC has ordered the Reserve Bank to pay compensation after its "unnecessarily abrupt" sacking of a long-serving manager while he took leave, finding it led him to believe at the mid-point of a performance management process that he remained "on track" to retain his job.
In a case that weighs up employer rights when conducting investigations under commonly-used agreement provisions, a FWC full bench has rejected a worker's request for an investigation report that details his alleged misconduct, but has suggested the employer re-open its probe because it denied him natural justice.
The FWC has reinstated a long-serving worker accused of violent threats to a colleague, finding the employer's circumstantial evidence fell short and did not establish that the incident occurred.
A major employer has for the second time in a year been ordered to reinstate a worker after the FWC again identified fatal flaws in its investigation processes.
An organisation that supports members of the Stolen Generation did not have a reasonable basis for dismissing a worker for alleged "cultural insensitivity", but other conduct would have justified her sacking if it followed a proper process, the FWC has ruled.
A worker's "unfortunate" comment to the FWC that "it is nearly impossible to injure someone when driving a forklift at 8km/h", demonstrating his "unsatisfactory understanding of workplace safety", has clinched a ruling that upheld his sacking, after he admitted to smoking marijuana the night before a collision.
A senior FWC member has rounded on a national business's HR team for the "crude" and disrespectful process it followed to make one of its own members redundant, suggesting it engage in some "sober reflection".
Extending employers' duty of care to the disciplining and sacking of workers would not "frustrate" contractual certainty or disrupt businesses, lawyers for a charity's former consultant have told the High Court.
