Labour hire company - unfair dismissal

This recent case warns that labour hire companies cannot "abrogate [their] responsibilities to afford procedural and substantive fairness to a dismissed employee by relying on the fact that unfair treatment was meted out by another entity in which [they] had placed the employee."

Adecco Australia were found by the FWC to have unfairly dismissed a factory worker it withdrew from its client's factory after she was wrongly accused for card clocking - a practice whereby an employee clocks off another employee.

The employee was assigned as a casual factory worker at the end of 2012 to Nestle Chalet Patisserie where she worked regular hours on what was essentially a full time basis for almost two and a half years.