The FWC has reduced the redundancy entitlements of five former employees of online trading platform Bartercard after they refused new positions requiring them to work exclusively from home and to fork out the full cost of setting up an appropriate space.
The FWC has "condemned" an employer for characterising its bid to redeploy a worker to a "substantially different role" as fulfilling its redundancy obligations and has refused to reduce his severance payment.
A full Federal Court has clarified the extent to which employers must investigate alternative roles for workers caught up in restructures, finding that a mining company had an obligation to assess whether employees could replace already-engaged contractors before making them redundant.
An employer has failed to convince the FWC that it should reduce a worker's redundancy payment from 13 weeks to six, finding that although it secured another job for him on the same pay, losing private use of a company car meant the role was not "substantially the same".
The FWC has awarded compensation to an accounts assistant who said she could not return to the office after working from home for almost a decade, while her employer maintained that the arrangement only began with the pandemic.
A full Federal Court has overturned orders for a big company to compensate a former employee for a "sham" redundancy, finding a judge wrongly ruled on the necessity of a business restructure.
A judge has rejected a sales director's claim that his employer sacked him within hours of him telling his manager he intended to take unpaid parental leave on the birth of his two surrogate children.
The FWC has found that a company's failure to meet modern IR standards, including its HR manager's attempt to "retrospectively" dismiss a security investigator, provided the necessary exceptional circumstances to accept her late unfair dismissal application.
