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.
The FWC has refused to reduce two FIFO workers' redundancy pay, finding that redeployment offers did not amount to "other acceptable employment" because they were given insufficient time to consider roster changes that would also have reduced their time at home.
A "wealthy" global sports company's mistaken belief that a sacked manager took unapproved days off has contributed to a judge finding that it should be hit with only 25% of the maximum penalty for taking three months to pay out his annual leave entitlements.
The FWC has halved the redundancy payouts for two finance workers who stood in the way of their employer's attempt to find jobs with a competitor by declining its request for updated resumes.
The FWC has "condemned" an employer for characterising its bid to redeploy a worker to a "substantially different role" as fulfilling its redundancy obligations and has refused to reduce his severance payment.
A full Federal Court has clarified the extent to which employers must investigate alternative roles for workers caught up in restructures, finding that a mining company had an obligation to assess whether employees could replace already-engaged contractors before making them redundant.
An employer has failed to convince the FWC that it should reduce a worker's redundancy payment from 13 weeks to six, finding that although it secured another job for him on the same pay, losing private use of a company car meant the role was not "substantially the same".
A lawyer has been fined $2400 and her eponymous firm a further $12,000 after a judge highlighted her "unreasoned and unreasonable" belief that the FWO wrongly concluded that it underpaid a legal secretary.
A judge has rejected a sales director's claim that his employer sacked him within hours of him telling his manager he intended to take unpaid parental leave on the birth of his two surrogate children.
The FWC has found that a company's failure to meet modern IR standards, including its HR manager's attempt to "retrospectively" dismiss a security investigator, provided the necessary exceptional circumstances to accept her late unfair dismissal application.