A team merger did not gut her role, the Commission found - her contract already let it change
In a twist on the usual redundancy fight, a senior editor at Australia's national broadcaster tried to argue herself out of a job. The Fair Work Commission would not let her.
The worker ran audio distribution as an editor at the ABC. When her team merged with another in December 2024, she told her managers the restructure felt like a "natural finish line" and asked to be made redundant. The merger, she argued, had wiped out her position and left nothing meaningful for her to do.
Her employer saw it differently. Her managers said neither she nor her role was redundant, because the work she did still needed doing. They told her she did not have to take a different job or manage new staff, and that she could stay focused on her existing responsibilities.
The disagreement went to arbitration under the ABC's enterprise agreement and section 739 of the Fair Work Act. The worker wanted the Commission to declare her redundant under the agreement, or to find that the employer's conduct triggered redundancy pay under the Act.
In a decision issued August 11, 2026, the Commission ruled against the worker on the questions she cared about most. It found she was not redundant, that her employment had not ended, and that the employer still needed her job done.
The outcome turned on her contract. One clause let the employer require her to "perform a broader range of functions and/or move between functions and work areas (including between divisions) within the limits of your competence, training and classification." The Commission held that whatever changes followed the merger sat comfortably inside that clause. Her position carried on, it found - just with wider duties the contract already permitted.
The Commission also knocked back the claim that the merger had gutted her role. Lining up her post-merger duties against her earlier performance agreement, it found no diminution or elimination of the role, and said her claims of a sharp rise in workload, responsibilities and seniority were overstated.
The employer did not walk away without a mark. The Commission said the ABC's process in responding to her redundancy request "could have been better," and that greater attention should have been paid to spelling out the merged team's structure and how the two editors would fit within it. But a clumsy process, the decision made clear, is not a redundancy.
For HR leaders, the takeaway is sharp. A broadly worded flexibility clause gives an employer real scope to redeploy people and reshape jobs without tipping into redundancy - provided the changes stay within the worker's competence, training and classification. The case also confirms that, under an agreement worded this way, whether an employee is still required is the employer's call to make, not something a worker can declare for themselves.
There is a documentation lesson too. The only real criticism landed on planning and communication, not on the law. Clearer records of the new team's structure and reporting lines would have spared the broadcaster that rebuke - even in a matter it won. For anyone running a restructure, the message is to map roles and reporting lines before the merger lands, not after the questions start.
