A FWC presidential member has suggested policymakers give greater consideration to recognising the "industrial qualifications" of migrant workers after ruling an employer unfairly dismissed a factory hand when it made him redundant without consultation due to his unsuccessful attempts to obtain an Australian forklift licence.
A judge has compiled a checklist for workers pursuing employers over unreasonable hours, highlighting the difficulties a product marketing manager faces in building her adverse action case without detailed evidence of workloads, deadlines and demands to complete tasks.
Mining giant Peabody has won special leave from the High Court to challenge a full Federal Court finding that it did not genuinely make workers redundant when it failed to consider whether it could redeploy workers to jobs performed by contractors.
The FWC has accepted that a company made a HR manager redundant on her return from parental leave due to her discomfort with interviewing English-speaking job candidates and downsizing directions from its Chinese head office, rather than her status as a new mother.
Two recycling industry workers have been allowed to keep 30% of their redundancy payments after the FWC accepted that while their former employer found them acceptable alternative employment, it involved moving from a "nice, clean" office to a "dusty, malodorous" one.
Rex airlines group's administrators have retrenched almost 600 employees, making them priority creditors, but if they end up relying on the FEG scheme, they're in for a long wait.
A charity ordered to compensate a retrenched financial analyst has been reminded by the FWC that consultation involves "not merely telling a worker" they have been made redundant months after deciding to restructure their team.
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".
The FWC has urged David Jones to improve its retrenchment processes, while opening the way for a long-serving worker to pursue an unfair dismissal case after the department store deemed her unsuitable for redeployment to an area serving "elevated" clientele.