An employee was sacked for the serious offence of posting vulgar insults about a female colleague on Facebook who then took his former employer to court for unfair dismissal. This we learn from British server HR Review.
The sacked Teggart worked in customer care at the TeleTech UK Limited call centre in Belfast. During the free time he spent on Facebook, he made vulgar comments about his female colleague on the social network from his own computer. Other colleagues, his friends on Facebook, read the comments. When the female colleague found out, she asked the vulgar colleague’s girlfriend to remove the comments. However, this merely provoked Teggart into further vulgar tirades.
Teggart was sacked after disciplinary procedure at work for gross breach of the company’s Dignity at Work Policy. Teggart then turned to an Employment Tribunal to investigate unfair dismissal, but this was rejected.
The Tribunal stated that it was a matter of harassment and the creation of a degrading work environment, which company policy clearly prohibited. It was not important that the sacked employee did not direct the insults at the female colleague face-to-face. The arguments of freedom of speech and the need to respect the private life of the sacked employee did not stand up.
According to the labour law experts from British firm Doyle Clayton that HR Review quoted, employers now need to deal with similar cases in their in-house regulations and make sure that these include inappropriate behaviour outside work.
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