You are not required to sign a warning letter and you should certainly not do so if you consider the warning to be unjust or unreasonable.
If you believe your employer has unfairly or unjustly made your position redundant, it may have failed to follow procedural requirements surrounding the redundancy of your position. Your employer is obliged to follow a process prior to making the redundancy package payment.
With over a quarter of Australian workers forced to take annual leave over the Christmas holidays when business is slow or shut down, it is critical that employees understand their rights in relation to mandated leave.
The general rule is that employers are entitled to direct employees to take annual leave where the request is reasonable. This includes situations where:
Being made redundant can be an incredibly stressful time for any employee. With all the upheaval, it can be unclear what rights you have available to you as an employee. While the process of seeing through a redundancy can be quite complex, it is important to understand what you are entitled to in order to ensure you receive what you are duly owed.
An employee has a right to procedural fairness during an investigation process into allegations raised against him/her. This means, that the employee has a right to defend themselves against allegations made against them.
In Australia, it is most common that an employer will have absolute discretion to decide whether an employee is entitled to receive a bonus or pay rise.
Unions play an important role in the workplace by representing the interests of employees during workplace disputes and acting as a bargaining representative during negotiations. However, it is unlawful for your employer to force you to join a union.
Pursuant to Part 2A of the Surveillance Devices Act 1999 (Vic), it is an offence for an employer to use an optical device to carry out surveillance of the conversations or activities of employees in the workplace bathrooms or change rooms. An ‘optical surveillance device’ means any device capable of being used to record visually or observe an activity and CCTV cameras are caught under the act.
You are classified as a labour hire employee if you have an employment contract with an agency but you are assigned to perform work for another organisation (the host). In recent years, the use of labour hire employees has grown significantly and businesses now routinely look to agencies to provide their ongoing labour needs.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a common feature of modern business and organisations use KPIs to measure performance and ensure that employees are meeting operational and strategic goals. However, they are often abused by disreputable managers to emotionally dismiss an employee. The phrase ‘moving the goal posts’ is often used to describe setting challenging KPIs, while it is reasonable for an employer to set tough targets to grow the business, it should not be set in a way as to ensure an employee would never meet their targets.
Generally speaking, under s 101 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) employees are not allowed cash out sick leave unless their modern award or enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) contain specific terms which allows for sick leave to be paid out on termination of employment.
Generally bonuses and commission payments arise from a contract of employment. Accordingly, if bonuses or commissions remain due an employee has a right under their contract to recover these amounts.
Further, section 323 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) applies to ‘incentive-based payments and bonuses’ meaning there may also be a breach of the Fair Work Act 2009.
