No shifts felt like a sacking - but one contract clause decided this casual's fate
A casual worker said he was fired. The Fair Work Commission read his contract and disagreed.
When the kill numbers fell at a Cowra slaughterhouse, the shifts dried up. To casual meat process worker Will Hibbet, that silence felt like a sacking.
So he took his former employer, Cowra Meat Processors, to the Fair Work Commission. He argued, under the general protections regime, that he had been dismissed - and that it was tied to a complaint he raised about overtime pay at a toolbox meeting on August 25, 2025.
But the Commission never reached the overtime question. In a decision handed down on June 9, 2026, Deputy President Boyce zeroed in on a threshold issue: was Hibbet dismissed at all?
It matters because of how the law is built. Under section 365 of the Fair Work Act, you can only bring a general protections dismissal claim if you were actually dismissed. No dismissal, no jurisdiction - the Commission simply cannot hear the case.
The answer lived in the contract. Hibbet was a casual, and his agreement said his hours were "not guaranteed" and that there was "no guarantee of ongoing regular work." Each shift was treated as a separate engagement that ended when the shift did. On that wording, the employer had no duty to keep offering work. So not offering it was neither a breach nor a termination.
The employer's evidence, which the Commission accepted, was that a genuine downturn - driven by lower daily kill numbers - left less work for casuals. Two other casuals got the same message. Hibbet was not singled out. And he stayed "active" in the company's HR system rather than being switched to non-active, which would have signalled the end of his employment.
Timing helped too. The gap between being told there was no work, on August 27, 2025, and filing his claim on September 17, 2025, ran about three weeks - "hardly a long period of time," the decision said. A long dry spell can sometimes hint at a dismissal. Three weeks did not.
For HR leaders, the lessons are concrete. Casual status rides on the contract and the real substance of the relationship under section 15A, and a regular pattern of work does not, on its own, turn a casual into a permanent or create a right to ongoing shifts.
Write casual contracts that say what they mean: no guaranteed hours, each shift its own engagement. Document the operational reasons when work slows. And mind your systems - keeping someone "active" rather than formally ending their employment can carry real weight if a claim arrives.
The Commission dismissed the application.
