Facebook Slag-Off Get Linfox Driver Sacked

• General News
• 15th March 2012

And although court ordered reinstatement the TWU warns members there are dangers in mixing work with social media.

A Linfox truck driver who made comments about managers on what he believed to be a private Facebook page was unfairly sacked according to Fair Work Australia.

But the case serves a warning to Facebook subscribers who make work-related comments during their internet chats.

TWU officials have noticed an increase in instances of employees being sacked for making derogatory online comments about managers and fellow employees.

The sacked man's remarks in the Linfox case included calling a Muslim boss a "bacon hater".

He also said: "I admire any creature that has the capacity to rip (managers) Nina and Assaf's heads off, shit down their throats and then chew up and spit out their lifeless body."

However in the Linfox case Commissioner Micheal Robert found that while some of the sacked man's comments could be considered on first reading to be offensive, when read as a whole they had "much of the flavour of a conversation in a pub or cafe, although conducted in an electronic format".

"The chains of comments have very much the flavour of a group of friends letting off steam and trying to outdo one another in being outrageous."

In the man's termination letter, Linfox said he had made comments about one manager that were "racially derogatory", while comments about a female manager amounted to sexual harassment.

The female manager found the comments on the driver's publicly accessible Facebook page.

The driver told the hearing that his Facebook account had been set up by his wife and daughter about 18 months before his dismissal, with "maximum privacy restrictions" and was not "open to the public."

He said that anyone accessing the site would have had to have spent some time navigating the site to see any of the comments that management had alleged were derogatory.

He said he considered Facebook to be "a place where I could privately interact with a group of people I had accepted as Facebook 'friends'".

The driver said it had never been his intention to cause offence to the managers and that he asked repeatedly since his termination to apologise to them personally.

Commissioner Roberts said he accepted that the driver was now fully aware that the comments on his Facebook page were "foolish", but that his page "was not a web blog, intended to be on public display. It was not a public forum."

Comments of a sexual nature about the female manager fell into a different category entirely. She was entitled to be outraged by those comments and to complain about them."

However, the offending comments were made by another Linfox employee, not the driver who had simply quoted them on his Facebook site.

Roberts noted that Linfox had no social media policy in place at the time the comments were discovered.

"In the current electronic age, this is not sufficient and many large companies have published detailed social media policies and taken pains to acquaint their employees with those policies. Linfox did not."

Commissioner Roberts said, after examining the evidence, that there was no valid reason for the termination of the drivers employment and that his dismissal was harsh, unjust and unreasonable.

He ordered that Linfox reinstate him and pay his lost wages.