He lined up his next job early - then his employer said he'd ended things himself
A worker who lined up his next job before his old one ended just cleared the first hurdle in his unfair dismissal case.
On June 25, 2026, the Fair Work Commission ruled that Serco Australia dismissed a detention officer at its Adelaide Immigration Detention Centre. The company had argued he ended his own employment by signing with the incoming contractor. The Commission disagreed.
The backdrop is one plenty of HR teams will recognize: a lost contract and a messy handover. Serco had run onshore immigration detention since 2009. In November 2024, the Department of Home Affairs told the company its contract would not be renewed, and operations began shifting to a new provider, Secure Journeys, in staggered stages. The Adelaide centre changed hands on May 5, 2025.
The worker had been with Serco since 2021, permanent full-time from late 2023. As the handover neared, he applied for the same role with Secure Journeys and signed with them on April 13, 2025, to start on May 5 - the day Serco's operation ended. He did not tell Serco.
This is where the people decisions get interesting. Serco sorted transitioning staff into three groups: those it would redeploy, those leaving with a redundancy, and those moving to the incoming contractor. It told employees that anyone who reached a deal with Secure Journeys "brings their employment to an end with Serco." It pressed the worker again and again to confirm his plans. He declined, saying he had checked with the Fair Work Ombudsman and was told he had no obligation to disclose.
On the last day, Serco wrote that because he had or would start with Secure Journeys, "that will bring your employment to an end with Serco at your instigation." It told him to hand back his uniform and access card, stopped offering shifts and paid out his entitlements. It never expressly said he was terminated.
The Commission wasn't convinced. The test, drawn from the long-running Mohazab case, asks whether the employer's action was the main factor ending the relationship - whether, but for the employer's conduct, the worker would have stayed.
The Commission found Serco's conduct met that test. Losing the contract, never offering a real redeployed role, ceasing duties, demanding the uniform back and paying out entitlements all pointed to the employer ending things. And the worker had only accepted the new role, not started it. He kept working for Serco until Serco stopped giving him shifts. Simply accepting another offer, the Commission reasoned, doesn't end your current job on its own - something more is needed to signal a resignation, and that never happened.
The Commission also rejected the idea that the worker's silence ended his employment. If Serco believed he was refusing a lawful direction, it could have run a disciplinary process. It didn't. And the "redeployment" on offer was never an actual job - just an invitation to express interest in roles he found unsuitable, including a corrections posting he said would put him and his family at risk.
The lesson for HR: under the Fair Work Act, you can't dodge a dismissal finding by announcing that an employee ended things themselves. Where the employer's own actions - lost work, no genuine redeployment offer, an end to duties - are what actually drive the split, the law can treat it as a dismissal at the employer's initiative, whatever the employee was arranging on the side.
Serco's jurisdictional objection was dismissed. The case now heads to a hearing on whether the dismissal was unfair - a question the Commission has not yet decided.
