He ran the company as CEO and even negotiated his own leave credit - so why wasn't he staff
A man who ran an AI healthcare startup as CEO has lost a dismissal claim - a tribunal found he was not an employee.
On July 22, 2026, the Fair Work Commission dismissed a general protections claim, finding it had no jurisdiction to hear it. The applicant, who had served as chief executive of an AI healthcare startup, was an independent contractor rather than an employee. Under the Fair Work Act, only an employee who has been dismissed can bring a claim of this kind, so the classification question determined the outcome.
The worker ran the startup as CEO but supplied his services through his own company under an independent contractor agreement. When the arrangement ended in March 2025, he argued that the contractor structure had been a "sham to avoid obligations" and that he had in fact been an employee who was constructively dismissed - pushed out by the employer's conduct rather than leaving voluntarily. The company objected that he had signed a contractor agreement through his own corporate entity and could not use the dismissal jurisdiction.
To decide the point, the Commission applied section 15AA of the Fair Work Act. Introduced after two 2022 High Court decisions, the provision directs decision-makers to look beyond the words of the contract to the "real substance, practical reality and true nature" of the relationship. In practice, that means weighing a range of factors: who...
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