A recent Australian Fair Work Commission ruling confirmed that an employer's decision to sack an employee was valid because he had breached his contract by running a personal business alongside his role at the firm without approval.

Across South East Asia, I have seen numerous examples over the years where an employee's side gig has interfered with them carrying out their main work duties.

Some of the more interesting:

An employee who never came to work on Mondays. We discovered he was operating a similar business on weekends and Mondays and then working in his main job Tuesday to Fridays.

An employee operating an eBay store from under their work desk. Jammed with different products, it almost constituted a fire hazard. Another employee was using the office address (searchable on Google) as the address for their retail outlet.

By far the most interesting example was an employee operating a competing business, complete with its own website, from the company's own premises.

The employee was in a position to redirect business to his own business. He used company negotiated supplier rates for his own business and, from what could be ascertained, was at times billing all his customer costs to the company while retaining all income.

Obviously, this was more fraud than a side gig.

And, while not strictly a side gig, there was the employee who would spend his evenings blogging about his daily work activities. Nothing particularly wrong with that except he would go into detail about confidential client meetings and upload copies of confidential documents from the meetings. Probably wasn't the smartest career advancement move.

Another not quite side gig was the employee who would spend his days surfing not-safe-for-work websites, copying images and emailing them to colleagues and friends. His online activity timeline showed he started as soon as he arrived at work and continued until the end of the day with a break for lunch. He came to management's attention as he inadvertently copied the global head of HR on one of his emails. Oops.

Worker dismissed for side-hustle he claims to have disclosed

February 2026

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