Some Australian universities have engaged in "passive resistance" when questioned over employee underpayments and record-keeping, according to Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker.
A court has fined the director of a Japanese restaurant almost $25,000 after finding that he "reverse engineered" pay records provided to the FWO and asked a shortchanged employee not to "sell me out".
A Federal Court judge has while fining a franchisor almost $500,000 for deliberately underpaying Taiwanese interns speculated that a recent High Court ruling will impel more parties to agree on penalties rather than go to trial, an "unfortunate by-product" being fewer judgments offering "yardsticks" for future cases.
The Federal Court has applied the "precautionary principle" in accepting the FWO's view on the process for calculating underpayments for 19,000 salaried Woolworths employees, while it has also indicated that jointly managing the matter with a similar Coles case "would be useful".
The aircraft engineers union says no employers should require proof of COVID-19 inoculations that include individual healthcare identifiers, with Virgin agreeing in consent orders to delete the material amid concerns they could be used to access medical histories for other purposes.
The FWO alleges in court proceedings filed yesterday that Coles owes its managers about $100 million more than it has made allowance for following internal payroll audits looking at the underpayments.
The FWO has begun prosecuting retailer Woolworths for allegedly substantially underpaying salaried managers who had been subject to annualised salaries.
Two franchisee directors of a Chatime bubble tea store have had most of their underpayment penalties suspended after a court accepted they acted on their franchisor's advice that they could pay age-based flat rates.
A judge who took exception to a business being liquidated during an underpayment case was entitled to impose heavier penalties on the owners than sought by the FWO, an appeal court has found.