Week 8: Australia, before the reform

Uber Eats, DoorDash and Menulog under the old rules, and the shape of the gap the 2024 reform was written to close

Contract law, doing a labour law’s job#

Before the 2024 reforms, a food-delivery rider in Australia was, for most legal purposes, an independent contractor governed by ordinary contract law — no minimum-standards framework written for platform work specifically, and no settled assumption that the Fair Work Act’s protections extended to them at all. Whatever protection a rider got, they got by first winning an argument about which body of law even applied to them.

The jurisdiction fight that came before the merits#

Early cases at the Fair Work Commission mostly weren’t about whether a dismissal was fair — they were about whether the Commission had any power to hear the case at all. Kaseris v Rasier Pacific Pty Ltd [2017] FWC 6610 is the case most often cited as the template: an Uber driver’s unfair dismissal claim was dismissed not on the facts of what happened to him, but because the Commission found he wasn’t an employee in the first place, so it never reached the merits. A rider had to clear that jurisdictional threshold before a single fact about their treatment got argued on the merits, and that threshold wasn’t always met, which meant some disputes never reached the question they were actually about.

What one ruling can’t fix#

Even a rider who won an individual unfair-dismissal case won it for themselves, on their specific facts — it set no minimum standard for pay, no floor for the sector, and left the next rider to relitigate the same jurisdictional threshold from scratch. Kaseris itself illustrates why: its reasoning turned on the specific contract terms Uber had written for that driver, which meant a differently-worded contract from a different platform could produce a different jurisdictional answer entirely. That’s precisely the gap the 2024 reform, covered next week, was built to close — a standing category, rather than a fresh argument every time.

Before the session#

Read the assigned case summary and identify the specific legal test the Commission applied to decide whether it had jurisdiction at all.