A Brief:
Employment rights have been highlighted a lot in the recent times, even by the industrial experts to be watchful of protecting employee rights, in order to maintain the reputation as well as to prevent the best talents from leaving their organisation.
Employees need to be aware of their rights to be at an advantage of not falling into the pit of undue partial environment. One of such cases highlighted here is the case of Andrea Castle, an employee of Sage Marketing Direct Pty Ltd, who was terminated for not following the email policy of the organization. Below is the case study of how Andrea was supported with the employment rights.
The Common Law Australia and Fair Work Act 2009 were used in the case to argue in favour of Andrea Castle. Case began by presenting the key points of the case, evaluating if the recommendations provided is true and ending the case with a brief conclusion tying the content report together.
Key Points presented for the case study:
1). As per the organization’s Enterprise Agreement, employer can terminate the employee without any notice, but only if the employee has done a major breach that would affect the company. Andrea Castle has used this point to argue for her case.
2). A day after Andrea’s belongings got stolen at her friend’s house, she forwarded an email to the employees of Sage Marketing Pty Ltd, where she identified the thief having a “coloured arm”. This offended the employers because as per them, Andrea made a racist comment but in reality, she was only trying to provide the robber’s identity.
3). Employ Agreement clearly stated that Andrea can use the company’s email address for her personal use so Andrea is not at fault for using it for her personal use.
4). Andrea’s intention of sending the email to her fellow colleagues was to just make them aware of the incident and she did not hurt anyone’s feelings with the email.
Fair Work Act 2009, applied on the case:
The Fair work Act 2009 was brought into effect in 2010 and was initiated by Australian government, to balance out the work of Employers and Employees. This act affected the performance of the employees as they felt more secured and worked with ease. This act has also attracted talents from different parts of the world.
As per a clause in Employment Agreement of Sage Marketing Direct Pty Ltd read, “The use of email for personal, private purpose or non-business use should be only on a limited basis.” Clearly, Andrea did not use the email for private concerns but only to create the awareness among her fellow employees as she was concerned about them.
The fact that Management has accused Andrea of breaching the email policy for using the word “coloured arm” was baseless because Andrea was trying to describe the robber and she did not have any other details of the person. In no means, did she intentionally offend anyone’s feelings. That was the best information she could have provided about the thief.
