DEWR is consulting on potential changes to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee, after finding an increasing number of companies are deliberately using the scheme, designed as a "last resort", to avoid their obligations.
The FWC has rejected an employer's bid to avoid paying redundancy entitlements to a nurse who refused to transfer to a higher-paying, non-nursing "technician" role.
A FWC presidential member has underlined that workers are not immune from retrenchment while on leave or working under flexible arrangements, confirming that operational issues warranting severance can arise at any time.
A recruitment company leader seeking to challenge the restraints in his employment contract and a shareholder agreement has been allowed to continue the case in NSW, after related entities in Great Britain failed to convince the Federal Court to stay the matter because of an exclusive jurisdiction clause.
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.
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 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.
Extending employers' duty of care to the disciplining and sacking of workers would not "frustrate" contractual certainty or disrupt businesses, lawyers for a charity's former consultant have told the High Court.
