His employer turned out to be Australian - but that still wasn't enough to get him a hearing
A worker based overseas asked Australia's Fair Work Commission to hear his dismissal claim - and learned it had no power to.
In a decision handed down on September 4, 2026, the Commission dismissed a general protections claim brought by a worker based in the Philippines, finding that Australia's workplace laws did not reach his job.
The worker was hired in January 2025 as head of offshore delivery for a company that supplies outsourced staff to Australian and overseas businesses, including a large Australian retail group. He signed his contract in the Philippines, worked there in full, and was let go in July 2025 at the end of a 180-day probation after being told he had not met the performance standards for the role.
He then lodged a general protections claim - the part of the Fair Work Act that shields workers from certain kinds of unfair treatment - arguing his dismissal breached it. Over several months he changed his account of who actually employed him more than once, beginning with the outsourcing provider and ending with a group of related Australian companies he said were acting "jointly and in concert." His main point was that the decisions that counted - pay, staffing and day-to-day control - were made in Australia, so Australian law should cover him wherever he sat.
The companies raised a jurisdictional objection - a threshold argument that the Commission had no power to hear the case at all. They said he had never been "dismissed" in the sense the Act uses, because he was not employed by an Australian employer inside the national workplace system. On their account, he worked for a Philippine regional headquarters, a foreign entity beyond the Act's reach.
The Commission's president did not see it that way. Reading the licensing paperwork, he found that an Australian company had simply registered to operate in the Philippines under a regional-headquarters name. That made the worker's employer an Australian company - and the companies, who carried the burden of proving their objection, had not shown otherwise.
Even so, the claim could not proceed. The Act's general protections reach overseas only to an Australian employer's "Australian-based" employees. The worker did not fit: he was hired in the Philippines to do the job in the Philippines, which placed him inside an exception written into the law. Because he was not an Australian-based employee, the protections did not apply - and without them, there was no "dismissal" for the Commission to examine.
The application was dismissed on the jurisdiction question alone. The Commission did not rule on whether the dismissal was fair or lawful. That issue was never reached.
For HR teams that run offshore or outsourced workforces, the decision marks a clear line. An employer being Australian is not enough on its own to bring an overseas worker under the Fair Work Act. Where someone is hired, and where they actually work, can decide whether Australian protections apply at all - and adding a layer of supervision from Australia does not change who the law treats as the employer, or where the worker stands.
