No shifts felt like a sacking - but one contract clause decided this casual's fate

A casual worker said he was fired. The Fair Work Commission read his contract and disagreed.

When the kill numbers fell at a Cowra slaughterhouse, the shifts dried up. To casual meat process worker Will Hibbet, that silence felt like a sacking.

So he took his former employer, Cowra Meat Processors, to the Fair Work Commission. He argued, under the general protections regime, that he had been dismissed - and that it was tied to a complaint he raised about overtime pay at a toolbox meeting on August 25, 2025.

But the Commission never reached the overtime question. In a decision handed down on June 9, 2026, Deputy President Boyce zeroed in on a threshold issue: was Hibbet dismissed at all?

It matters because of how the law is built. Under section 365 of the Fair Work Act, you can only bring a general protections dismissal claim if you were actually dismissed. No dismissal, no jurisdiction - the Commission simply cannot hear the case.

The answer lived in the contract. Hibbet was a casual, and his agreement said his hours were "not guaranteed" and that there was "no guarantee of ongoing regular work." Each shift was treated as a separate engagement that ended when the shift did. On that wording, the employer had no duty to keep offering work. So not offering it was neither a breach nor a termination.

The employer's evidence, which the Commission accepted, was that a genuine downturn - driven by...

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