A senior FWC member has refused to recuse himself for addressing a worker's representative as "mister" in an unfair dismissal case that argued an employer should have permitted an unvaccinated employee to keep working from home during COVID-19 restrictions instead of sacking her.
The Albanese Government's first major tranche of IR legislation beefs-up workers' rights to secure flexible working arrangements and empowers the FWC to arbitrate if conciliation of a refused request fails.
Victorian courts have vowed to tackle the "open secret" of s-xual harassment, endorsing recommendations that include actively identifying judicial officers known or suspected of such behaviour and "taking steps" to protect vulnerable staff from them.
The Senate Work and Care inquiry's Labor and Greens majority is urging the Albanese Government to move swiftly to consider a right to disconnect, make flexibility requests an enforceable right and provide "roster justice" by ensuring workers with variable hours have predictability and certainty, in a 152-page interim report tabled this afternoon.
In a detailed examination of a major government department's early response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Court has rejected union claims that a hastily-conceived working from home policy breached existing arrangements and consultation requirements.
An appeal court has rejected a former Employsure senior manager's challenge to an injunction stopping him from using knowledge acquired at the IR advisory business with a competitor, but a colleague "induced" to follow him has overturned his own restraint.
A court has found that a union official needed to bring his phone onto a worksite to protect the rights of employees he represented, ruling that a meat processing company unlawfully hindered him by refusing entry unless he surrendered it.
A Victorian Police fingerprint expert has been reinstated after the FWC found her dismissal for "deceitfully" calling her detective husband's ex-lover during work hours both disproportionate and harsh in terms of its financial impact.
IR advisor Employsure has failed to stop Workplace Express from accessing part of a manager's adverse action claim, after contending that it contained confidential information about a restructure that could give competitors an advantage.
