He pointed to his "younger female" manager to explain the sacking. The court wasn’t persuaded
A coffee wholesaler has beaten a discrimination claim from a former supervisor who said he was sacked for being a man.
The worker joined Single Origin Wholesale, an Australian coffee business, as a production coordinator in October 2024 and moved up to a supervisor role in March 2025. By mid-April, his job was gone. He took the company to the Federal Circuit and Family Court, and on August 20, 2026, he lost.
He made two claims under the Fair Work Act. The first: that he was sacked because of his sex or gender identity. He is male, and pointed to the fact that his manager was, in his words, a “younger female.” The second: that he was sacked because he had taken sick leave, backed by two medical certificates. The court rejected both.
The case is a clean look at how a “general protections” claim works - the kind where a worker says they were fired for an illegal reason, such as their sex or their sick leave. These cases hinge on one question: why did the boss really make the call? And they come with a twist many employers miss. Once a worker points to an illegal reason, the law assumes that was the reason for the sacking (under section 361 of the Fair Work Act). It then falls to the employer to prove it wasn’t.
Here, the person who made the call was the company’s chief executive. He told the court he decided to let the worker go on the afternoon of April 10, 2025 - still inside a...
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