A single 'renewable' clause put the whole dismissal question in play
One word in a contract - "renewable" - decided a recent unfair dismissal case before it ever reached a hearing.
A facilities manager at S P Jain School of Global Management asked the Fair Work Commission to hear his unfair dismissal claim, saying he was dismissed on December 31, 2025. The employer challenged the claim before it could get to a hearing. Its argument was blunt: no one dismissed him. His one-year fixed-term contract had reached its end date, and the job ended with it.
On June 30, 2026, the Commission agreed. It upheld the employer's jurisdictional objection - a challenge to whether the Commission could hear the case at all - and dismissed the application.
For HR, the lesson sits in how much weight the contract's wording had to carry.
The worker's 2025 contract set the term as "1 Year (Renewable on a yearly basis)," with an end date of December 31, 2025. He argued that "renewable on a yearly basis" meant the contract could be renewed more than once. Under the fixed-term contract limits added to the Fair Work Act in December 2023, a contract that can be renewed more than once can breach the rules - and where it does, the end date can be treated as having no effect. On that reading, expiry alone could not end his job.
He had a second argument. The contract let either side end the employment on notice. A contract with a broad right to terminate on notice, he said, is not truly for a fixed period.
The Commission did not accept that the contract was a sham. It found the January 2025 contract was a genuine fixed-term contract with an agreed expiry date. There was no automatic rollover, and no attempt to string together contracts to sidestep the Act. The employer had, in fact, offered a fresh one-year contract for 2026 - which the worker rejected.
Conduct came into it too. The Commission noted that on December 22, 2025, the worker rejected the new contract, then locked the campus front doors and refused to hand over company property and information. It described this as "unusual and inappropriate behaviour for any employee, let alone one that believes that he has an ongoing permanent employment relationship."
There was a longer backstory the parties fought over. For years before 2025, the worker had provided services through his own company as a contractor, then moved onto a direct employment contract in 2025. The employer relied on that history to argue the 2025 job was a distinct, genuine fixed-term arrangement.
So what should HR take from it? Watch the renewal language. Wording that hints at repeated or automatic renewals can hand a departing worker an argument that a contract was never genuinely fixed-term. Here, a single standalone one-year term, a clear end date, and a separate new offer for the following year supported the Commission's finding that the contract was genuinely fixed-term and had simply expired.
