The FWO provides education, advice and a range of tailored dispute resolution tools to promote harmonious, productive, cooperative and compliant workplace relations. In the 2019–20 financial year, this also included a number of new resources and services to assist the community through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

We also enforce workplace laws in response to requests for assistance, and through FWO-initiated activities. Further details about our functions and approach are included in our Purpose and our Compliance and Enforcement Policy, which are both available on the FWO website.

In 2019–20, we recovered over $123.4 million in unpaid wages for more than 25,000 workers through requests for assistance involving a workplace dispute, FWO-initiated activities, and large corporate companies self-reporting underpayments to us.

To support deterrence, we issued 116 media releases over the year that reported on our compliance and enforcement activities.