She fled domestic violence, then lost her job for speaking up
She raised her concerns on a Friday. By Sunday, the termination letter was in her inbox.
A federal court has ordered a Sydney commercial laundry company to pay more than $84,000 in penalties after finding it dismissed a worker who had complained about unpaid wages.
The decision, handed down on November 5, 2026, in May v Hybrid PG Pty Ltd (No 2) [2026] FedCFamC2G 2168, dealt with compensation and penalties following an earlier liability finding against Hybrid PG Pty Ltd and the company's sole director. The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia had already found, in a March 2026 liability judgment, that Hybrid PG contravened the Fair Work Act 2009 by taking adverse action against the worker, failing to pay her wages in full, and failing to make superannuation contributions.
Neither the company nor its director appeared at the penalty hearing. They did file written submissions.
A complaint on Friday, a termination letter on Sunday
The worker started at Hybrid PG's Mascot premises in August 2022, employed as a permanent part-time worker with a six-month probation period. The company ran a commercial laundry operation servicing a contract with Qantas.
For the first month, everything ran to plan. From September 12, 2022, the company stopped paying her wages in full. Her weekly net pay dropped from $561 to $467. The court found this followed a unilateral decision to cut hourly rates across the organisation.
Superannuation contributions went unpaid too. The company's operations manager had confirmed by text message in October 2022 that contributions would be made quarterly. They were not.
On December 2, 2022 - a Friday - the worker's legal representative emailed the company a letter raising her complaints. Two days later, on Sunday, the company emailed a termination letter signed by the director, giving one week's notice.
A vulnerable worker in an impossible position
The worker's circumstances at the time made the dismissal especially consequential.
She had relocated to Australia from Myanmar in March 2019 on a temporary visa with her then-husband and their son. In late September 2021, she and her son fled domestic violence and moved into a women's shelter in Western Sydney. When her ex-husband discovered that shelter's location, they moved to a second in southeastern Sydney.
At the time she worked for Hybrid PG, she was living in an apartment with rent partially subsidised by the shelter, paying about 25% of her income toward rent. She was not eligible for Medicare or Centrelink benefits. She occasionally relied on the Red Cross, the Asylum Seekers Centre and the Jesuit Refugees Service.
The court accepted that she believed her job was a condition of staying in the apartment and was "very concerned" about having to return to the shelter. She started applying for new jobs immediately - three or four applications on December 4 or 5.
After her last day on December 9, the court found she could not afford groceries for herself and her son, relying on aid packages from community organisations.
By early January 2023, she had found work at a cookie factory in Alexandria at $24.50 an hour, averaging $390.81 gross per week.
The company eventually paid most of the outstanding wages on February 6, 2023 - almost two months after the termination. A balance of $329 gross remained unpaid. Superannuation was partly addressed in April 2023, but $48.63 remained outstanding.
How long would she have stayed?
A key question for the court was how long the worker would have kept her job had the unlawful dismissal not occurred.
The worker argued she would have remained employed until at least May 2023, when the company's contract with Qantas came under serious threat. The company said her shift inflexibility made her role unviable even by early 2023.
The court sided closer to the company's timeline. By late 2022, laundry was arriving later in the day, requiring afternoon and evening shifts. The worker could not work those hours. Apart from a handful of permanent employees, the rest of the workforce was casual. The court found she most likely would have been let go with one week's notice at the end of her probation period - no later than February 8, 2023.
That gave an economic loss window of roughly eight weeks.
The bill
Total compensation came to $8,853: $4,353 in lost wages (including interest) and $4,500 for the distress and embarrassment the unlawful dismissal caused. Separately, $438.62 in superannuation contributions plus $33 in interest was ordered paid into the worker's nominated fund.
The court accepted the worker had suffered genuine distress, noting that pre-existing difficulties did not rule out compensation for harm the dismissal caused or made worse.
Then came penalties.
The company had asked the court to cap penalties at 5-10% of the statutory maximum and suspend them altogether if the remaining $648.28 owed was paid within 14 days. The court dismissed that approach. Penalties exist for deterrence, not as "a proxy for unpaid wages," the court held.
On the adverse action - the dismissal triggered by the worker's complaint - the court accepted the submission that the conduct could "on the facts be viewed as retribution." The worker had a legal right to raise her entitlements. The fact that she had to push for them, and was then terminated because of it, made the conduct "particularly troubling and more serious," the court found.
The court also pointed to the power imbalance: the worker was one of 80-100 employees, a single mother on a temporary visa, with limited English, in a new country. The director was described as "the head and heart" of the company.
Hybrid PG was ordered to pay $42,900 for the adverse action (65% of the statutory maximum), $16,531 for the underpayment (25%) and $16,531 for the superannuation failures (25%) - totalling $75,962. The director was separately penalised $8,658 for his involvement in the adverse action under section 550 of the Fair Work Act. Combined penalties across both respondents came to $84,620.
The court described the respondents' approach to their legal obligations and to the proceedings as "a markedly casual approach." It found neither contrition nor remorse. Entitlements remained partly unpaid years after the employment ended.
On the question of whether the company's reported cessation of trading reduced the need for penalties, the court noted the director had given evidence at the liability stage that he "had a couple of other businesses" - meaning specific deterrence still mattered.
The respondents have filed a notice of appeal against the liability judgment. No stay application has been made. A costs hearing is to follow.
For HR teams, the takeaway is practical: a complaint letter arriving on a Friday should not produce a termination letter on Sunday, no matter how pressed the business is. Courts will look at the timing, and they will draw the obvious inference.
