He kept flagging an impossible caseload. His employer built a sacking case instead
A Tasmanian care provider treated performance problems as misconduct to justify a dismissal. On August 31, 2026, the Fair Work Commission ordered the worker back to his job.
Community Based Support Limited, a not-for-profit delivering aged care and disability support in Tasmania, sacked one of its care coordinators in March after assembling 27 concerns about how he managed clients. The Commission found most of those concerns described ordinary performance shortfalls, not misconduct - and that the employer had brushed past the issue the worker himself kept raising: an unmanageable caseload.
The coordinator had worked there more than five years with little trouble. He was also a Health Services Union delegate and a bargaining representative in talks over a new enterprise agreement.
His warnings about workload were in writing and came early. In a December 2025 email to his manager, he said “the overall workload has become increasingly challenging to manage” and that his client numbers were pushing past the level where, as he understood it, a second coordinator should be brought in. “I hope this isn’t seen as a complaint,” he wrote. “I’m just concerned that the high workload is getting in the way of providing quality care to our clients.”
The Commission found the employer’s response to those concerns thin. An executive manager accepted under questioning that he did not regard the workload complaints as valid, and the Commission concluded that “nothing material was done about them.”
Much of the disciplinary case rested on one client the coordinator was accused of not following up on quickly enough. That client had been admitted to hospital in December 2025 and died there that month; the coordinator did not check in until mid-January 2026. The employer called this the “primary incident” and said it “may have led” to the hospital admission and death. The Commission was unpersuaded, accepting the coordinator’s account and finding no evidence his conduct exposed anyone to “unacceptable risk.”
The allegations grew to 27 items - late follow-ups, missing file notes, slow service set-ups, billing mistakes. In late March the employer declared all of them “substantiated” and labelled the conduct “misconduct.” The chief executive, signing off on the dismissal, pointed to conduct she described as “grossly negligent in terms of care of our clients.” The Commission rejected that label, calling it a “mischaracterisation” and finding the failings were, at worst, performance shortfalls the employer had not raised formally at the time.
A gap in the employer’s evidence proved costly. The manager said to have repeatedly reminded the worker to finish tasks did not testify. Without her, the Commission found there was “really no evidence” the worker knew his performance was seen as a problem before the first allegations arrived in late January 2026.
The employer’s defence for skipping warnings was that this was misconduct, so none were required. Once the misconduct label failed, so did that defence. An August 2024 first and final warning that described earlier conduct as “supervisory neglect” counted for something, but not enough.
The Commission ruled the dismissal harsh, unjust and unreasonable, citing the lack of a valid reason, the ignored workload pressure and the abrupt end to a long, largely clean record. A claim that the worker’s union role drove the decision was rejected for lack of evidence.
The remedy was reinstatement to his old role with continuity of service preserved, plus lost pay based on his weekly rate over about 24 weeks, less anything he earned since the dismissal, to be finalised once he provides evidence of those earnings. The employer’s argument that his return would endanger clients went nowhere: the Commission found no such risk and noted reinstatement remains the first remedy the law reaches for in unfair dismissal cases.
