The Federal Court has rejected a CFMEU (mining and energy division) argument that BHP Coal breached an enterprise agreement and the Fair Work Act's adverse action provisions when it refused to eject a HR advisor from a disciplinary meeting.

A worker at the open-cut Goonyella Riverside Mine in Central Queensland's Bowen Basin in late 2009 rolled a ute while driving around the site.

BHP Coal, which employs workers at the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance-owned mine, directed the worker to attend a succession of meetings to investigate what had occurred and whether the worker should be disciplined as a result.

At one of the meetings, BHP Coal managers invoked clause 44 of the agreement that applied to the site, the BHP Coal Pty Ltd Workplace Agreement 2007, which sets out disciplinary processes that apply at the mine.

The CFMEU, which represented the worker, maintained that only the worker, his union representative and his supervisor were entitled to attend clause 44 meetings, and on that basis sought to contest the employer's view that it had a right to have one of its HR advisors attend the meeting.

The worker and his union representative walked out of the meeting - and boycotted several subsequent meetings - after BHP Coal refused to withdraw the HR advisor.

As a result of the meetings the employer dismissed the worker for serious misconduct, after determining that in the lead-up to the accident he had failed to follow the site speed limit, not worn a seatbelt and driven on the wrong side of the road.

Before the Federal Court, the union argued the employer in refusing to withdraw the HR advisor had breached clause 44 and taken adverse action against him in breach of the Fair Work Act's s340.

Justice Berna Collier found that if clause 44 imposed a limitation on who could attend disciplinary meetings, under the agreement that restriction only applied to meetings called to deal with incidents that involved human error and not involving serious misconduct.

The meetings in this case did not fall into that category, and therefore the clause 44 restriction - if it existed - could not have applied, she said.

On the adverse action argument, Justice Collier ruled that nothing the employer or its managers had done constituted an injury or a threat to injure the employee in the exercise of his workplace rights.

Justice Collier dismissed both the union's agreement breach and adverse action claims on that basis.