Three cleaners argued rolling contracts gave them a right to stay. The Commission tested that claim
Three cleaners said their expiring contracts amounted to a firing. On July 3, 2026, the Fair Work Commission disagreed - and drew a clear line.
The workers were employed as Cleaning Service Officers in the Education Directorate of the Australian Capital Territory. They were hired for a specific purpose. The Territory had built a temporary "surge" workforce to cover permanent cleaners while it worked through a backlog of accrued leave. The three made a merit list and were offered work.
Their contracts, signed in early January 2025, were titled "Temporary Employment Contract." Each set out a fixed period running from January 23 to June 27, 2025, said the job would end when that period closed, and stated the employee had no reasonable expectation of work beyond it. When the leave program ran long, the Territory offered extensions from June 28, 2025 to January 28, 2026. The workers signed again.
On January 28, 2026, the Territory told them their employment had ended.
They applied to the Fair Work Commission under section 365 of the Fair Work Act - the general protections path, which requires that a person has "been dismissed." The Territory objected immediately. There was no dismissal, it said. The contracts had simply reached their end date. That objection went to jurisdiction, so the Commission had to resolve it before anything else.
The workers argued context should win. Their roles, they said, were really part of the "ongoing operational workforce," not a short-term surge. Other staff on similar contracts ending the same day were offered permanency or extensions; they were not. They pointed to a practice of temporary staff being extended repeatedly and eventually made permanent, which they said gave them a reasonable expectation of continuing work. One of the workers had applied for a permanent role after being encouraged to. A backlog meant that application had not been assessed by the time the case was filed.
The Commission was not convinced. The decision turned on section 386(2)(a) of the Fair Work Act, which says there is no dismissal where a person is employed for a specified period and the job ends when that period closes. The contracts were clearly temporary and fixed-term, spelled out the dates, and said the employment would end at term. The workers did not claim they were unaware of the terms or that the terms had changed. The Commission also rejected the argument that they were part of an ongoing operational team - the contracts, it found, said otherwise.
The outcome: no dismissal, the Territory's objection upheld, and the applications dismissed. Because there was no dismissal, the Commission never reached the question of whether the workers were treated unfairly next to colleagues who kept their jobs. That merits question was left undecided.
For HR, the takeaway is practical. A genuine fixed-term contract that expires on its own terms is not a dismissal - even where a worker has been rolled over more than once, and even where the employer keeps hiring for the same kind of role. What mattered here was the paperwork: clear end dates, an express statement that the job ends at term, and language ruling out any expectation of ongoing work. Strip those out, or let day-to-day conduct contradict them, and the "reasonable expectation" argument gets much harder to defeat. Contract language does real work. Informal "we'll probably keep you on" signals can quietly undo it.
