A "very bad" employer who used a website builder's alleged probationary period to sack her without warning must pay $20,000 in compensation, the WA IRC has found.
The head of Western Australia's Industrial Relations Commission has vented her frustration at the efforts of an unfair dismissal advocate by expressing a desire for legislative changes that would empower the tribunal to "discipline" underperforming agents.
Leading employment law academics have urged a WA inquiry to consider a growing body of evidence that wage theft is "not so much an anomaly, as a norm", while the AiG says that characterising under-payments as stealing is misleading.
Rio Tinto artificially limited contractual terms when it denied two FIFO mineworkers their entitlement to an extra allowance for nights spent away from their work base, the WA Industrial Relations Commission has found.
A WA law firm will have to defend a restricted legal practitioner's underpayment and unfair dismissal claims after it failed to convince the state's IRC that he was an independent contractor, with the tribunal finding that only common law employees can be engaged in such roles.
The ripples from a recent decision upsetting the authority on outer limits contract workers pursuing unfair dismissal claims have reached another jurisdiction, with the WA IR Commission ordering the reinstatement of a septuagenarian school traffic warden who had been "taken advantage" of by the employer.
The legislative tension between state and federal union rules has been highlighted after a tribunal dismissed an expelled official's bid for reinstatement on the basis that it lacked the jurisdiction to give orders or directions to a national body.
McGowan Government IR Minister Bill Johnston has commissioned barrister and former acting WA IRC president Mark Ritter SC to review the State's IR system.
