The Federal Court has ordered a construction company to reinstate an electrician until it decides whether it took adverse action by sacking him within 10 days of his becoming a health and safety representative and reporting suspected asbestos in a water tunnel.
The Federal Circuit Court has ordered indemnity costs against two casual employees who refused offers to settle their adverse action and award breach cases for $10,000 and maintained their demands for $95,000 payouts.
James Cook University is fighting back against a Federal Circuit Court finding that it unlawfully sacked an academic who criticised prominent climate research, while the NTEU has welcomed a finding that the institution's code of conduct is "subordinate" to an intellectual freedom clause in its agreement.
The FWC has rejected a claim that a chemist operator's HR chief and two managers bullied a pharmacist by failing to roster enough support staff to assist him on Saturday shifts.
A full Federal Court has upheld a finding that agreement-sanctioned union stopwork meetings can be freely used to delay and disrupt business as part of a campaign strategy, but has increased fines for the CFMMEU's coercion of head contractor Hutchison by almost 30%.
A dispute between Macquarie Bank and 15 former employees who allege they were underpaid more than $2.6 million looks destined for a full hearing after the Federal Circuit Court rebuffed the parties' request for mediation by a judge.
The FWC has upheld the sacking of a Telstra business centre's IT technician accused of supplying drugs, accessing p-rnography, sending the director's confidential documents outside the company and remotely locking the entire workplace out of the network during an investigation into his conduct.
The FWC has upheld the dismissal of a 63-year-old male employee who sent text messages calling a 37-year-old male colleague his "bitch" and "toy boy" and threatened to "molest" him and squeeze his testicles until it made him cry.
A Tasmanian wood mill operator that stood down its workforce after this year's bushfires has established that even though its agreement requires workers to be paid for time lost due to such natural events, it does not have to pay them if it is because of bushfire-damaged machinery.
The FWC has rejected as "pedantic and technical" an attempt by Telstra to block industrial action it claimed was inconsistent with that endorsed by CEPU members.
