The FWC has ordered former IR Minister and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's alma mater Xavier College to pay a teacher $14,000 for his unfair dismissal, ruling it harsh because he had never held another job and his messy desk, late marking and poor interactions with his colleagues did not justify his axing after 21 years of service.
In a decision illustrating the challenges of conducting cases involving remote Indigenous employers, the FWC has awarded $18,000 to a sacked chief executive after failing to engage the respondent in proceedings despite 14 phone calls, numerous emails and five notices sent by express post.
The RACQ was entitled to sack an employee repeatedly punched in the face by a tow truck driver after attending an accident, a presidential member noting a lawyer's question as to what the worker might reasonably have expected when he pushed someone from an industry not known for its "shrinking violets".
The FWC has pointed to a worker's knowledge of the 21-day deadline for filing general protections claims in declining to allow his late application to proceed, despite finding that responsibility for the delay rested "overwhelmingly" with his lawyers.
A major charity engineered the departure of a "serial complainer" after the "intuitively odd" involvement of a specialist IR law firm, a court has found.
An aged care home has been ordered to pay almost $400,000 in damages and penalties to a Chinese nurse summarily sacked after she complained that Filipino co-workers received more favorable treatment.
The Fair Work Act's compensation cap has operated inequitably to allow Guzman y Gomez to "benefit from its poor treatment" of a hard-working casual denied shifts while a HR manager maintained she remained employed, a senior FWC member has found.
The FWC has found it "fanciful" to suggest that an employer might allow a HR professional to send extensive confidential information to his personal email address without authorisation, ruling his serious misconduct warranted dismissal.
A casual Coles worker with limited availability has failed to overturn his sacking following a hiatus of more than three months, but the FWC says the store manager should have taken an additional step before dismissing him.
A listed gold producer has succeeded in halving a mine caretaker's redundancy pay after the FWC found that it trimmed the "uncomfortable" responsibilities in a proposed alternative role to the point where it almost mirrored his existing job.
