Sacked worker faces big bill for failed FWC claim
BRISBANE: A sacked Queensland worker who used AI to aid his failed unfair dismissal claim faces a significant legal bill after the Fair Work Commission said that it would welcome his former employer pursuing costs against him.
In a scathing judgment, FWC deputy president Nicholas Lake found the worker “repeatedly displayed a disregard for facts and has relied on incoherent legal arguments in order to contrive a basis to claim compensation”.
The worker confirmed he used AI tools to assist in organising and drafting submissions to the FWC, but insisted the information, evidence and factual statements he provided were based on his own knowledge and documentation.
Commission president Adam Hatcher last week unveiled new requirements to combat the enormous level of AI-generated claims flooding the tribunal, declaring that material generated by AI tools could be “inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, or just made up”.
The increasing use of generative AI tools by potential litigants has driven a 70 per cent jump in the FWC’s workload over just three years.
Mr Lake said the worker had consistently relied upon non-existent provisions of his contract and the waste management award as the basis for his argument.
“Even after being warned in an email from my chambers that he should not provide false or misleading evidence, he continued to make submissions on this basis,” he said.
“It was only after I reminded the applicant that he was providing sworn evidence in the hearing that he accepted that his contract did not say what he contended it did.”
Despite the worker’s contract not being an excessively long document, Mr Lake said he chose to rely on AI to “extract” terms of the contract which did not exist, instead of reading the contract which he signed.
“Further, even after being informed in the hearing that the clause from the Waste Management Award 2020 he was relying on did not exist, he continued to argue that it did and relied on that non-existent clause in his closing submissions,” he said.
The worker had alleged constructive dismissal after he resigned in protest at proposed temporary changes to his rostered shift time.
