THE nation's industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.

In the latest ruling to concern business, Fair Work Australia found the worker had engaged in "relatively serious misconduct", but ruled the sacking harsh due to his length of service and the fact he was a poorly educated middle-aged family man, The Australian reported.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said the ruling sent the wrong message, and "really exposes employers to double jeopardy".

"Here we have an employee repeatedly failing to observe health safety obligations, a valid reason for dismissal found to have existed, but the company still found to have acted unlawfully," said the chamber's workplace policy director, David Gregory.

"It makes it very difficult for employers to try and work their way through this maze of what seem to be competing obligations contained in different pieces of legislation.

As workplace relations continued to feature prominently in national politics yesterday, senior union leader Joe de Bruyn declared Tony Abbott's plan to scrap minimum shift requirements for young workers as "worse than Work Choices".

The Australian: Unions say Abbott policy exploits youth

Sacked for taking glasses off

During a shutdown at Norske Skog Paper Mills in Albury last September, Paul Quinlivan and a colleague were cleaning out a tank that captured staples from recycled pulp, when he repeatedly removed his safety glasses and was told four times by a manager to put them back on.

The tribunal accepted that his repeated failure to wear the safety glasses and his disdainful and abusive response to management amounted to serious misconduct.

But the tribunal said the sacking was a "disaster" for Mr Quinlivan, taking into account that he had worked at the mill for 20 years, was married with two daughters, aged nine and 11, and had a mortgage of about $70,000.

"If the applicant had substantially lesser service; had not been a middle-aged man with very poor employment prospects for whom the dismissal has such serious personal and economic consequences; or if it had been brought home to him at any time on 2 September, 2009, that a further breach would have serious consequences, I would not have concluded that the dismissal was harsh," vice-president Michael Lawler found.

He said Mr Quinlivan should have been warned rather than sacked. He ordered his reinstatement and that he be paid $16,000.

Read more in The Australian.