Employers might be tempted to judge and respond with
equal speed to an employee's social media post, but they must
remember the aphorism "act in haste, repent at
leisure".
With the relative novelty of platforms such as Facebook, there
is a temptation to treat unfair dismissal cases dealing with social
media as in a special category. While these cases do have some of
their own characteristics, old school fundamental notions such as
procedural fairness nevertheless remain at the heart of such
decisions.
An illustration of this is the recent Fair Work Commission case
of Colby Somogyi v LED Technologies Pty Ltd [2017] FWC 1966.
As often happens with decisions relating to social media, this
case has attracted considerable media attention. Some of the
reports of this case have focused on the prurient nature of the
Facebook posts concerned, but glossed over the procedural
considerations that actually led to the outcome.
