Mazi v Elizabeth Andrews Pty Ltd

This dispute began with a very short casual employment relationship in a catering business. Grace Mazi worked five shifts for Elizabeth Andrews Pty Ltd commencing on 29 November 2022. The company operated a commercial kitchen and employed kitchen assistants and cooks. It was covered by the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020, and during Ms Mazi’s brief period of work the company classified her as a Kitchen Attendant Grade 1.

After those shifts, Ms Mazi lodged a worker’s compensation claim for an injury sustained in her employment and did not perform any further work for the business. The dispute then expanded into a broad Fair Work proceeding. She alleged that she had been misclassified under the Award and underpaid, and she also raised a range of other claims about payslips, payment timing, deductions, workplace rights, employment documents, superannuation and dispute resolution obligations.

The company was not the only target. Ms Mazi also pursued claims against the company’s owners and directors, and against the financial controller responsible for payroll, alleging they were involved in the contraventions as accessories.

The central issue in the underlying case was award classification. Ms Mazi argued that her duties should have placed her in a higher classification than Kitchen Attendant Grade 1. The appeal reasons show that this argument focused on the actual work she performed, including assembling yoghurt pots, measuring ingredients, and some cooking-related tasks. She said those duties should have led to a Grade 2 classification.

The Award descriptors mattered. Grade 1 included general cleaning duties within a kitchen or food preparation area, assisting employees who are cooking, assembling and preparing ingredients for cooking, and general pantry duties. Grade 2 referred to an employee with the appropriate level of training who is engaged in specialised non-cooking duties in a kitchen or food preparation area, or in supervising kitchen attendants.

The dispute did not stop at classification. Ms Mazi also alleged that the employer failed to issue compliant payslips and employment documentation, failed to pay her on time, made unauthorised deductions from wages, engaged in coercive conduct, made misleading representations about workplace rights, and failed to comply with the Award dispute resolution procedure. There were also arguments about whether she should have been paid for an alleged 11 December 2022 shift, whether superannuation was payable during her injury-related absence, and whether workplace documents had been made available in the way the Award required.

That mix of issues is commercially realistic. In practice, employment disputes often combine one major issue, such as classification, with several smaller payroll and process complaints. For employers, that means a dispute can become much broader than the original disagreement very quickly.

The Federal Court had to decide whether Ms Mazi should be allowed to appeal late from the earlier liability judgment. Because the earlier judgment dealt with liability only and left relief for later hearing, it was treated as an interlocutory judgment. That meant she needed both an extension of time and leave to appeal.

The Court set out the usual test for leave to appeal from an interlocutory decision. In practical terms, the question was whether the earlier decision was attended with sufficient doubt to warrant reconsideration on appeal, and whether substantial injustice would result if leave were refused. For the extension of time, the Court also considered the length of delay, the explanation for it, and whether the delay caused prejudice.

The Court accepted that Ms Mazi had a reasonable explanation for the delay. She was self-represented and had misunderstood the difference between final and interlocutory orders. The respondents did not point to identifiable prejudice caused by the delay. But that did not decide the matter. The Court said that if the proposed appeal grounds had no reasonable prospects of success, time should not be extended.

So the real work of the judgment was a detailed review of the proposed appeal grounds. The Court went through them one by one to see whether they identified any genuine legal or factual error in the earlier liability judgment.

On classification, the Court held that the proposed ground lacked merit. The earlier judge had carefully set out the evidence about Ms Mazi’s duties and made factual findings that were open on the evidence. The appeal reasons record that the earlier judge accepted she assembled yoghurt pots by combining yoghurt and other ingredients into a container and measuring ingredients for consistency, but was not satisfied that this amounted to specialised non-cooking duties for Grade 2. The earlier judge also found that she cooked pancakes for no more than two hours on one shift and did not cook bacon and eggs, but instead trayed them up for another person to cook. Those findings supported Grade 1 duties such as assisting employees who are cooking and assembling and preparing ingredients for cooking. The Court also noted the earlier finding that the training relied on by Ms Mazi was ordinary food industry training, not the kind of training contemplated by the Grade 2 descriptor.

On payslips and payment administration, the Court said the proposed grounds were vague and lacked merit. Importantly, the earlier judge had in fact found a breach of the payslip requirements, so there was no failure to engage with that issue. As to alleged deductions, the earlier judge had found that Ms Mazi was paid for her actual hours of work and that no deduction had been made. Because the proposed appeal did not properly challenge that factual finding, no appealable error was shown.

On the alleged 11 December 2022 shift, the Court said the earlier judge had found that Ms Mazi was not rostered on and therefore was not entitled to be paid for that day. The appeal complaint tried to recast the issue, but the underlying factual finding remained. The Court treated the related complaint about payment timing for that day as dependent on the failed argument that she should have been paid for the shift at all.

On continuing Award obligations, the Court rejected the proposed grounds about superannuation, employment documents and dispute resolution. For superannuation during injury-related absence, the Court said the earlier judge had correctly focused on whether Ms Mazi had established the precondition of being entitled to accident pay under the Award. The earlier judge found she had not. For employment documents, the Court accepted the earlier finding that the employer had made documents available through a QR code on a noticeboard in the training room and through hard copy documents in administration offices accessible to staff 24 hours a day. The Court said the Award required accessible electronic means or convenient physical availability, not personal issue of documents or a specific induction about their location. For dispute resolution, the Court said the earlier judge had found that the Award procedure had not been invoked by Ms Mazi, and had also found in the alternative that even if it had been invoked, non-compliance had not been established.

On coercion and misleading representations, the Court again found no merit. The appeal reasons show that Ms Mazi’s complaint involved CCTV, break times, alleged retrospective deductions and asserted workplace rights. But the earlier judge had found that she failed to identify the workplace right said to be the subject of coercion or the false or misleading representation. The Federal Court held that this failure was fatal to those claims.

On accessorial liability, the Court said that because the earlier grounds failed, the challenge to the findings concerning the individual respondents largely fell away. The Court also noted that, to the extent there had been limited contraventions in Ms Mazi’s favour, no civil penalties had been imposed in the later penalty judgment because the contraventions were inadvertent and contributed to by her.

McElwaine J dismissed the application for an extension of time. Although the Court accepted that the delay had a reasonable explanation and that the respondents had not shown prejudice, the decisive issue was merit. The Court concluded that the proposed appeal grounds were devoid of merit and that the earlier liability judgment was not attended with sufficient doubt to warrant reconsideration on appeal.

That means the employee was not permitted to proceed with the appeal. The earlier liability outcome therefore remained in place. As summarised in the appeal reasons, the employer had been found to have committed two contraventions only: failing to pay for work performed on 4 December 2022 within the agreed weekly pay period in accordance with the Award, and failing to provide a pay slip for that work with the required information within the prescribed time frame.

The later penalty judgment imposed no penalty because those contraventions were treated as honest mistakes and oversights contributed to by the employee. That point is important for business readers. No penalty did not mean no breach. The contraventions still stood. The no-penalty outcome was about the court’s assessment of the circumstances surrounding those breaches, not a finding that the payroll obligations did not apply.

The Court also noted that the respondents made no submission that the discretion to make a costs order under s 570 of the Fair Work Act was engaged.

For business owners, the most useful reading of this case is practical rather than technical. The employer appears to have succeeded on most issues because the earlier judge made detailed factual findings about what actually happened. That included what duties were performed, whether a shift was rostered, whether any deduction was made, and whether documents were accessible in the workplace. Courts often decide these disputes by testing the evidence against the award wording and the payroll records, not by accepting broad assertions from either side.

The case also shows that routine compliance failures can still matter even where the larger dispute goes your way. Here, the employer defeated many claims but still contravened the Fair Work Act in relation to one late payment and one non-compliant payslip. Those are basic payroll administration issues. A business can therefore be mostly successful in litigation and still come away with adverse declarations.

Another important point is that the appeal decision was procedural. It should not be read as a broad statement that all similar employer conduct will be lawful. It means only that, on the proposed grounds advanced, the employee did not show a viable basis to disturb the earlier liability findings.

The appeal reasons highlight several kinds of evidence that can become decisive in employment litigation. First, there was evidence about the employee’s actual duties. That was central to classification. Second, there was evidence about payroll events, including whether a pay slip contained the required information and whether wages had actually been deducted or simply paid according to hours found to have been worked. Third, there was evidence about rostering, including whether the employee had in fact been rostered for 11 December 2022. Fourth, there was evidence about workplace document access, including the presence of a QR code on a noticeboard and hard copy documents in accessible offices.

For employers, the lesson is that compliance is not just about having a policy somewhere in the business. It is about being able to prove what was available, what was communicated, what work was done and what payment was made. In hospitality and catering businesses, where casual work, changing duties and fast-moving rosters are common, those records can be the difference between a contained dispute and a much larger one.

A common question is whether this case means an employer can avoid penalties if a breach was accidental. The answer is no. The later no-penalty outcome turned on the particular circumstances found in that case. Businesses should not assume that an honest mistake will avoid penalties in another matter.

Another common question is whether making documents available electronically is enough. In this case, the earlier finding accepted by the Federal Court was that a QR code on a noticeboard and hard copy documents in accessible offices satisfied the Award requirement. But the key point is that the relevant award wording matters, and the employer must be able to prove the documents were actually available in the required way.

Businesses also often ask whether a dispute about one shift or one payslip is too minor to matter. This case shows that it is not. Even where the broader claim fails, a single late payment or a single non-compliant pay slip can still produce a finding of contravention.

The Federal Court judgment was delivered on 25 May 2026. It dismissed the application for an extension of time to seek leave to appeal from the earlier liability judgment. The earlier liability judgment had been delivered on 15 August 2025, and the later penalty judgment on 4 December 2025. The extension application itself was filed on 8 January 2026. The matter was determined on the papers, with the applicant self-represented and the respondents represented by counsel.

This means the public significance of the 2026 decision is procedural. It confirms that the proposed appeal did not identify arguable error in the earlier liability findings. It does not replace the earlier first-instance reasoning on the underlying employment claims.

This page is based on the Federal Court decision Mazi v Elizabeth Andrews Pty Ltd [2026] FCA 638, delivered by McElwaine J on 25 May 2026. The judgment records the procedural history, summarises the earlier liability and penalty outcomes, and explains why the proposed appeal grounds lacked merit.

The earlier decisions referred to in the reasons are Mazi v Elizabeth Andrews Pty Ltd [2025] FedCFamC2G 1284 and Mazi v Elizabeth Andrews Pty Ltd (No 2) [2025] FedCFamC2G 1992. This page is general information only and not legal advice.