Western Australian Industrial Appeal Court (August 8)
A DECISION in the WA Industrial Appeal Court has cleared up some of the confusion surrounding redundancy payouts.
Epath was appealing against a WA Industrial Relations Commission decision that ordered it to pay its former employee Ihann Adriansz $14,197.26 for redundancy plus a denied contractual benefit of $8,492, even though there was no redundancy clause in his employment contract.
Mr Adriansz was employed in 1999 by Epath as a medical scientist, plant and equipment manager, technology manager and marketing support officer.
He eventually became a director and shareholder of Epath and at times gave personal guarantees for loans made to the business.
When Epath sold its business to Clinipath Laboratories in March 2000, some of its employees were transferred to Clinipath and Mr Adriansz worked for that company briefly during the changeover period.
However, he was not granted employment with Clinipath beyond that transitional arrangement.
Commissioner Stephen Wood, who first heard the case, decided that Mr Adriansz’ should be entitled to payment for a reasonable period of notice plus unpaid entitlements for call-outs because he had been unfairly dismissed.
He also referred to documents produced in the course of the hearing that indicated another employee had received redundancy payments and that Epath had indicated in correspondence that, as a gesture of goodwill, it would pay employees a redundancy payment to non-transferring employees.
