Five cleaners, three companies, one question the Ombudsman got wrong
The Fair Work Ombudsman spent years building a sham contracting case against two directors of a small cleaning company. The Federal Court threw it out.
In a decision handed down on October 2, 2026, the court dismissed the Ombudsman's application in Fair Work Ombudsman v Chambers [2026] FCA 1452, finding the regulator had pursued the wrong entity entirely. The five migrant cleaners at the centre of the case were not employed by ProClean HQ. They were employed by Spotless Facility Services - the facilities arm of ASX-listed infrastructure group Downer EDI.
The case centred on night-shift cleaning at Sydney Trains' Auburn Maintenance Centre between February 2018 and April 2019. Downer, the majority shareholder of Spotless, held the head contract with Sydney Trains for maintenance, cleaning and security. Spotless subcontracted cleaning and security to iGuard Australia. iGuard, in turn, involved ProClean - a company run by the two directors - in managing payments to the cleaners.
The Ombudsman's case was straightforward on paper: ProClean had the workers sign written "contractor agreements," paid them via invoices, and assigned them identification numbers starting with "PHQ." That, the Ombudsman argued, made ProClean the engaging entity - and because the workers were really employees, not contractors, the company had engaged in sham contracting and underpaid them a total of $124,202.60.
The court saw it...
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