A senior FWC member has held that an abusive "alt-right" employer unfairly sacked an apprentice for refusing to assist his pursuit of revenge against a former employee, describing the company managing director as having the most deplorable attitude to HR management she had ever encountered.
An employer who sought to "retrofit" a requirement for workers to have a clean police record should have obtained external HR advice to avoid unfairly sacking a storeworker over his criminal past, the FWC has found.
Armaguard has been ordered to reinstate two security guards sacked for their part in a "string of failures" that resulted in almost $60,000 cash being stolen, the FWC finding that the company failed to take into account numerous mitigating circumstances.
A supervisor at Gina Rinehart's Roy Hill iron ore mine claims the company sacked him for making complaints and inquiries about his employment, at one point allegedly interviewing a former colleague he'd accused of assaulting him in an attempt to "dig up dirt".
The FWC has praised the "extraordinary lengths" an employer took to support a worker suffering from domestic violence before it sacked her for failing to improve her attendance.
Westpac was entitled to dismiss a premium client manager for putting customer service ahead of protecting their personal information when he loaned his allegedly troublesome work phone to a visiting relative and used his private Gmail account as a workaround for the bank's "slow" internal email system, the FWC has found.
The FWC has ordered an employment agency to pay 26 weeks' wages in compensation to a job placement officer it sacked for failing to declare convictions for Centrelink fraud, the tribunal criticising an HR manager's handling of the process while pouring water on claims that a clean record was an "inherent requirement" of her job.
An HR manager's "unnecessary allegations" and "overreach" have contributed to a finding that although a drug and alcohol tester's failure to declare he was taking Nurofen Plus provided a valid reason for dismissal, his sacking was unfair.
The FWC on a rehearing has taken a different view of a beach inspector's claims that a supervisor authorised him to modify council cars, but found deficiencies with his employer's response that were "difficult to comprehend" given its HR expertise.
The FWC has taken a Westpac investigator and HR manager to task over their "blatantly unfair" handling of allegations against a lending agent, ordering the bank to reinstate him despite his breach of its email policy.
