His Uber account was cut off, but the law says that's not a dismissal
A failed unfair dismissal claim against Uber has put Australia's growing divide between employees and gig workers squarely in focus.
When Narinder Handa had his Uber delivery driver account deactivated on 10 January 2025, he did what many workers would do — he sought legal recourse. The problem was that the remedy he chose was the wrong one entirely, and it ended his case before it even began.
On 27 February 2026, Deputy President Masson of the Fair Work Commission dismissed Handa's application against Portier Pacific Pty Ltd, trading as Uber. The finding was direct: Handa was not an employee, and his unfair dismissal claim had no reasonable prospects of success.
The Commission was unequivocal: "He was clearly not an employee but was employee like worker claiming to have been unfairly deactivated from a digital labour platform." That single distinction decided everything.
Handa had lodged his application on 23 December 2025, some 347 days after his account was deactivated. The respondent raised three objections — that Handa was not an employee, that he was not dismissed, and that the application was filed outside the 21-day period. But it was the question of employment status that proved fatal. Because Handa was not an employee, no amount of argument about the circumstances of his deactivation could have saved the claim.
Deputy President Masson concluded: "I am satisfied that the application has no reasonable prospects of success as the Respondent was not the Applicant's employer."
Notably, the case never reached the question of whether the deactivation itself was fair or unfair. That remains entirely unresolved. Under Australia's Fair Work framework, platform workers classified as employee-like workers have access to a separate remedy — an unfair deactivation application lodged through an entirely different process, outside the unfair dismissal stream available to employees.
Under Australia's Fair Work framework, deactivating a platform worker's account is not simply an administrative action. It carries distinct legal weight, and the obligations that apply depend entirely on how that worker is classified.
For people and workforce professionals, the case surfaces realities that are hard to ignore. The legal architecture governing how working relationships end is no longer uniform. An employee dismissed from a role and a platform worker deactivated from an app sit in different legal categories, with different rights and entirely different avenues for dispute. Businesses that engage a mixed workforce — traditional employees alongside contractors or platform-based workers — need to know which obligations apply to each group, and whether their internal processes reflect that distinction. The question of whether Handa's deactivation was substantively fair was never examined by the Commission, and similar cases, filed through the correct channel, will eventually be tested on the merits.
The decision was handed down on 27 February 2026, by Deputy President Masson in Melbourne.
