After 30 years at Telstra, sent home over a hearing test

Valerie Martin joined Telstra in 1989 and from around 2000 answered Triple Zero calls. Since 2012 Telstra had known she had mild to moderate high-frequency hearing loss, and she worked with a headset covering both ears. From late 2017 Telstra considered her performance unsatisfactory. It put her on four performance plans and gave her two written warnings over slow answering and mishandled calls, including an ambulance call connected to the wrong suburb. The court also found she had altered the time on a call ticket.

In November 2019 an audiologist reported good speech discrimination, but Telstra's occupational doctor then reported that she was unsuitable for Triple Zero work. On 7 November 2019 her manager told her not to come back until she was medically cleared. Telstra paid her discretionary leave for a time, then nothing from 14 February 2020, the day she started her case. It later back-paid her base salary for those months, without admission. In May 2020 an ear specialist found her fit to return, but she did not go back. Her doctor certified her unfit for work, and she resigned in May 2021.

Her claims under the enterprise agreement, the Fair Work Act's pay rules and disability discrimination law all failed. But the court held that at common law an employer has no right to suspend an employee without pay. Doing so repudiated her contract, so whether the direction was reasonable did not matter. The court accepted that it materially contributed to a persistent depressive disorder.

Given her performance history, the court put the chance she would have stayed until her planned retirement at only 15%. That left $11,994.41 in lost wages after what Telstra had already paid. It awarded $30,000 for the psychiatric injury, and with interest the final judgment, in February 2025, was $45,933.92.