An early childhood education trainee has won more than $10,000 compensation after the FWC found her employer had no reason to sack her by text based on "vague" examples of misconduct and failure to complete a qualification for which she had not yet been assessed.
A FWC full bench has upheld the reinstatement of a senior academic dismissed for sending "intimate and romantic" messages to a PhD student he supervised.
In what stands as an object lesson in how not to handle performance reviews, the FWC has highlighted the role of "managerial cowardice" and a passive HR department while reinstating a senior academic who received an "exceeds expectations" score shortly before three colleagues formally complained about her conduct.
The FWC has awarded more than $30,000 compensation to a "frazzled" truck driver sacked after admitting to smoking a joint a few days before returning a positive roadside test result.
A FWC member who ordered a meatworker's reinstatement wrongly discounted as hearsay evidence that he allegedly called his Pacific Islander colleagues "tree apes" and "black c-nts", a full bench has found.
The FWC has awarded $15,000 compensation to a couple sacked within hours of each other for allegedly bullying the same manager by invoking a "summoning ritual" involving a pentagram and rubber ducks, and "mocking" her in a workplace chat group.
A senior FWC member has tripled the compensation sought by a worker sacked after her mother called the employer to convey in "abrupt and firm" tones that it should stop insisting on documentary evidence of a close relative's sudden death before paying bereavement leave.
A power industry worker who invited a colleague to continue their verbal jousting "outside" and told his supervisor to "get f--ked too" has won his job back after the FWC found his actions out of character in circumstances where he faced significant family health issues and "banter" was part of the workplace culture.
