A prominent labour arbitrator has upheld the discharge of a
long-term employee for posting offensive material about her
supervisors on Facebook, and in doing so, has clarified some of the
legal principles applicable to misconduct involving social
media.
In Canada Post Corporation v. Canadian Union of
Postal Workers1, a postal worker with 31 years of
service made comments on Facebook over the course of four weeks
that maligned and seemed to threaten two of her supervisors. While
the postal worker thought that her posts were private, and
restricted to her 52 Facebook Friends (including some co-workers),
she had failed to engage the privacy settings, leaving her Facebook
Wall publicly accessible. The Facebook posts were reported to
management by another employee. When the supervisors accessed the
site to investigate, they were both so disturbed by the contents
that they reported the postings to the police and required time
away from work.
