In a case highlighting the dangers of failing to engage with underpayments cases, an employer who did not respond to a claim it short-changed a teenage worker by $8000 must now pay him an additional $240,000 in penalties.
The CEPU has been fined $445,000 for historic reporting breaches, a Federal Court judge observing that the penalty would have been higher had the union not moved to clean up its act by employing a compliance officer.
The FWC has found an employer's failure to consult a pregnant worker before abruptly announcing her redundancy to be the "very definition of unfair", rejecting its submissions that a series of meetings were adequate.
An employer that unilaterally reduced the classification levels of two workers previously handed a pay upgrade has failed to convince the FWC it had no power to intervene in a contractual issue "masquerading" as an enterprise agreement dispute.
Workers' wages will continue to grow at about 2.2%, similar to the current WPI, partly because the forthcoming 0.5 percentage point rise in compulsory super payments will be mostly funded by forgone pay rises, according to the RBA.
A tribunal member "counter-intuitively" refused to award compensation to an unfairly dismissed employee after failing to assess financial loss and wrongly asserting that she had admitted to competing priorities, an FWC full bench has found.
The importance of 'choice versus direction' in determining whether employees are working or not has been highlighted in an FWC decision considering the case of boat masters and crew having their unpaid meal breaks interrupted to assist passengers on multi-day dive trips.
A home improvement company had a valid reason to sack a business manager who recklessly approved credit for a struggling customer, but the FWC has held that its process in dismissing him while on sick leave rendered it unfair.
Queensland mining employers could face up to 20 years in jail if workers die through their criminal negligence, under new legislation introduced into State Parliament yesterday.
An IT specialist with a major bank has failed to persuade the FWC that deployment to a new cloud-first role represented an agreement breach because it placed unreasonable demands on his fading capacity to learn.
