Each occasion that a casual employee works is treated as a separate engagement pursuant to a separate contract of employment. Casuals may be engaged from week to week, day to day, shift to shift, hour to hour, or for any other agreed short period.

Therefore, a casual employee does not have any continuous period of employment beyond any single engagement. However, a casual’s employment relationship with their employer continues after the end of each engagement – unless the employer initiates the end of that relationship. When the employer does this, the casual will be dismissed for the purposes of the rights and remedies available under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (FW Act).

In Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2024), the Fair Work Commission (FWC) had to determine whether a casual radio presenter had been dismissed. It did this with a close examination of how the casual employment was regulated by a written employment contract.

The employee commenced a 5-day casual engagement on 18 December 2023. On 20 December, she was summonsed to a meeting where she was told she was being taken off-air and relieved from performing any further work for the remainder of the engagement because of conduct considered to be in breach of the employer’s instruction and/or policy. Another employee replaced her immediately thereafter. The employee was not asked to return her security pass (albeit it was deactivated) and she continued to have the ability to access some of the employer’s computer systems. The employee later received a payment equivalent to the wages she would have received if she had completed the 5-day engagement.

The employer relied on a term in the casual contract that allowed it to change the duration of the engagement (e.g. cut it short) or the work to be performed. The employer argued it used this right on 20 December 2023 to vary the work of the presenter to nil during a 5-day engagement that was otherwise due to end on 22 December 2023. Therefore, the employment relationship either ended on its own accord on 22 December 2023, or was suspended pending the offer and acceptance of a new engagement.

The FWC ruled the employee’s service in her relationship with the employer ended when she was taken off air and allocated no further work. The contract may have continued beyond 20 December 2023 but the employment relationship did not. The payment for the period 20–22 December was not wages because it did not relate to service rendered under the contract. Rather, it was an ex-gratia payment, or a gratuity. Its payment, therefore, was not evidence of the continued existence of the employment relationship.

Therefore, the employee’s employment had been dismissed at the employer’s initiative on 20 December 2023 and the employee was therefore free to access dismissal remedies under the general protections scheme of the FW Act.