A recent case before the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal, Ferris v State of Victoria [2018] VSCA 240, serves as a reminder for employers that they can be found guilty of unlawful discrimination even if they were unaware of their employee’s disability, or the discriminatory effect of its requirements on individual employees.
Category: News & Commentary
What to make of the “Change The Rules” campaign
Last Tuesday, October 23, 2018, union rallies were held in Melbourne and Sydney in support of the Australian Council of Trade Union’s (‘ACTU’) “change the rules” campaign. The protests followed a series of national TV and radio advertisements launched in early October. The “change the rules” campaign is seeking to “re-balance the system and negotiate…
Can the Giants dismiss Shane Mumford for his out-of-hours conduct?
In the latest instalment of “professional sports stars behaving badly”, a video has surfaced of ex-GWS Giants and Sydney Swans player Shane Mumford snorting a line of powder. The incident allegedly occurred in 2015 when Mumford was still a player for the Giants, the club at which he currently works as an assistant coach. The…
California’s ‘ABC’ test for Independent Contractors – some key lessons for Australia
Australian workplace lawyers are parochial by nature. We don’t look at international examples very often. And given the tens of thousands of pages of domestic industrial instruments that we are forced to wade through each year, we can hardly be blamed for not seeking out more in our spare time. California, in particular, rarely gets…
Will the Fair Work Act protect a Cricket Australia employee’s right to tweet her political opinion?
Earlier in August, Fairfax broke the story of a Cricket Australia employee, Angela Williamson, allegedly sacked for criticising via Twitter the Tasmanian government’s policy on access to abortion services. It’s become a PR nightmare for Cricket Australia with the news of Ms Williamson’s dismissal doing far greater damage to Cricket Australia’s reputation than Ms Williamson’s…
Playing with fire: The real implications of Shorten’s proposal to reverse penalty rate decision
In May 2016 Bill Shorten said, speaking to the ABC, that a government proposing to legislate penalty rate outcomes was “playing with fire”.