A real downturn still wasn't enough to save this redundancy - here's where it fell apart
A company had a worker train the new hire taking over her duties - then made her redundant. The Fair Work Commission balked.
In a decision handed down on June 9, 2026, Deputy President Wright found that Sydney electrical contractor Kerfoot Pty Ltd unfairly dismissed its projects coordinator and ordered the family-owned company to pay her $19,108.08 plus superannuation.
The worker joined Kerfoot in March 2024. In mid-2025, a colleague in the projects administrator role resigned. Kerfoot created a new accounts receivable officer position, hired someone into it, and asked the projects coordinator to train that new hire from July 2025 in core functions of both her own job and the administrator role. That October, Kerfoot told her the position was redundant, citing a downturn in work.
The downturn was real. The Commission accepted that Kerfoot's revenue had fallen from June 2025. But that alone did not save the dismissal.
The problem was timing. Wright found Kerfoot had effectively decided to make the role redundant back in July 2025, when it hired the new staff member and began shifting the coordinator's duties to her - not in October, when consultation finally began. Under the Clerks - Private Sector Award 2020, which covered the worker, consultation must start as soon as practicable after a definite decision is made. Kerfoot was roughly three months behind.
By the time the company sat down with her, the parts of her role it wanted to keep were already being handled by the new hire. The Commission found she had no real chance to change the outcome. Consulted earlier, she might have offered to cut her hours temporarily while work was thin.
The consultation letter didn't help. The Commission found it spoke in general terms of "operational changes" without explaining why her role was no longer needed or how her work would be covered. That left her with nothing concrete to respond to.
Then came redeployment. Wright found it would have been reasonable to offer the worker the accounts receivable officer role - the very job she had trained the new hire to do. Kerfoot never offered it.
On those findings, the dismissal failed the genuine redundancy test and was harsh, unjust and unreasonable. Because the worker did not seek her job back, the Commission ordered compensation instead: eight weeks' pay on top of the two weeks already paid in lieu of notice. Based on her fortnightly gross pay of $4,777.02, that came to $19,108.08 plus superannuation, less tax, due by June 23, 2026.
For HR professionals, the takeaways are practical. First, the clock on consultation starts when the decision is genuinely made - and your own conduct can fix that date earlier than your formal announcement does. Second, a consultation letter has to actually explain the why and the how, or it isn't real consultation. Third, before finalising a redundancy, check whether an open or newly filled role could absorb the worker. If the employee trained the person now doing the work, a tribunal will notice.
A genuine downturn buys no free pass on process. Kerfoot had real financial pressure and still lost - on sequencing, disclosure and redeployment, the three places redundancy decisions most often unravel.
