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Employee successfully obtains an injunction preventing the employer from terminating the employee’s employment
Facts The employer proposed to terminate an employee during her probation period for reasons concerning information she provided about her previous employment with another Commonwealth department and the circumstances in which she left that previous employment. The employer’s letter to the employee indicated it was considering the termination of her employment for reasons that included that in a declaration the employee made during the recruitment process for the current role, she may have provided misleading information she knew to be misleading and wilfully failed to disclose information that she knew, or ought reasonably to have known was relevant to her response to the declaration. In this Federal Court decision the Court was determining an application for interlocutory injunctive relief to prevent the termination of the employee’s employment. First, the Court considered the General Protections grounds of the employee’s c...
30 January 2023Union seeking to obtain signatures on petition for majority support determination is not "holding discussions" for right of entry purposes
Introduction Recently there was a significant Federal Court decision on a union’s power to exercise right of entry to hold discussions under section 484 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (the Act). The question that the Court was primarily concerned with was whether the union’s purpose for right of entry, being to obtain the signatures of its members in support of an application for a majority support determination, fell within the meaning of “holding discussions” in section 484 of the Act. The union was unsuccessful in this case. Importantly, the Court held entry for the purposes of obtaining signatures on a petition to be used in an application for a majority support determination by the Fair Work Commission is not encompassed by the statutory language of entry for the purposes of “holding discussions”. Reasoning The Court first commented that the right of ent...
14 December 2022Critical Workplace Law Update – Pay secrecy provisions in contracts of employment now outlawed
As you may be aware the Labor Government’s most recent IR Bill has now been made law. Various aspects of the new laws commence at different times. Critically, one of the amendments that commenced today are the new laws prohibiting pay secrecy. The new provisions provide the following Employee Pay Secrecy Rights: an employee may disclose, or not disclose to any other person the employee’s remuneration and/or any terms and conditions of the employee’s employment that are reasonably necessary to determine remuneration outcomes, for example the number of hours that the employee works; and an employee may ask any other employee (whether employed by the same employer or a different employer) about the other employee’s remuneration and/or any terms and conditions of the other employee’s employment that are reasonably necessary to determine remuneration outcomes. Provisions in new or varied contracts of employme...
7 December 2022