An HR manager has failed to convince the FWC that a newly-merged company didn't genuinely scrap his role, while his refusal to move from his home town cruelled any redeployment opportunities.
A former BP manager is suing Puma Energy for almost half a million dollars in redundancy pay after he was sacked in the wake of his new employer acquiring the petroleum giant's local bitumen business.
The FWC has ordered an accounting firm to compensate a bookkeeper sacked in a "hopelessly cavalier" fashion via email while pregnant and holidaying overseas, rejecting the employer's claim it was a genuine redundancy.
A professional football club's chief operating officer is seeking $200,000 in damages after claiming that the employer unlawfully re-allocated some of his duties because of the time he devoted to his ill wife.
An employer must pay a former worker more than $50,000 after a tribunal found it contributed to her post-natal depression by making her redundant just as she was requesting maternity leave.
In what stands as a tribute to the qualities the FWC looks for in employers' legal representatives, an experienced tribunal member has praised a senior associate for "a masterclass in the art of advocacy" that avoided bamboozling or belittling an unrepresented bus driver.
The FWC, in contrasting redundancy decisions delivered on the same day, has agreed to slash the payment a small, pandemic-affected business must make to a worker, but has rejected another employer's bid to do the same for three of its former employees.
In the first significant pandemic-related dispute over mass lay-offs to come before the FWC, the Federal Court's transcription service provider has been criticised for making "hollow" consultation promises and reminded to treat workers "with dignity in this time of crisis".
The Federal Court has rejected a "novel" contention that the FWC would be invalidly exercising judicial power if it arbitrated a dispute under an agreement an employer inherited after winning a Defence Department tender.
An FWC bench led by Justice Iain Ross has shot back at a full Federal Court direction to properly answer a question posed by the president himself, maintaining it had already done so before highlighting the relevant passages.
