Can you call your boss a rich jerk?
If your bosses won’t listen on Slack, you can always try to make them do so in a courtroom
DISGRUTLED EMPLOYEES WITH a few choice words they’d love to get off their chest are keeping a close eye on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stateside these days, where a court is considering: if you’re snarky about your boss, can they fire you?
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The case at hand is that of Denise Unterwurzacher, an employee at software company Atlassian, and her boss, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. In June 2023, as Cannon-Brookes, part owner of the Utah Jazz basketball team, was discussing a restructuring plan, Unterwurzacher took to an internal Slack channel to vent her frustrations. “What’s up Outragers, just dialling in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummelled, wyd” she quipped.
Unterwurzacher was then handed her walking papers. Coincidence or retribution? That’s now something the courts are trying to sort out.
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The case has become a flashpoint for the limits on free speech within the workplace — and in particular, for Atlassian, how seriously it takes its own policy of ‘Open Company, No Bullshit,’ a corporate policy meant to promote transparency. “We call a spade a spade,” Cannon-Brookes once said of their company culture. “We want everybody inside the business to do that.”
Atlassian’s lawyers are defending the firing, saying the comments veered from criticism into ad hominem attacks. “Just because it was a CEO doesn’t excuse the conduct. It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk,’” said lawyer Troy Valdez
And therein lies the central question the case poses: at what point does an employee’s frustration with a manager or with working conditions cross the line from criticism to personal attack?
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Unterwurzacher is arguing that from an employee’s perspective, it is difficult, if not impossible, for an employee to do so in a way that doesn’t offend somebody. “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack,” she said during a cross-examination.
So far, lawyers with the National Labor Relations Board seem to be hewing towards protecting free speech. “Letting Atlassian fire her would upend well-established principles under U.S. law,” said NLRB attorney Colton Puckett. “Employees are allowed to collectively discuss and protest their working conditions, and they’re allowed to so in ways that their bosses may not like.” 
Kieran Delamont