‘If it’s good enough for Elon Musk’s business, then it’s good enough for my business’ is a position that some employers may have considered taking when the tech tycoon’s now famous ‘fork in the road’ email to Twitter staff hit the headlines in late 2022.
Irish employers who followed his lead will now be in panic mode after the Workplace Relations Commission recently ordered X to pay a former Twitter executive more than €550,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal.
The award to Gary Rooney, who worked in its Dublin office in October 2022 when Mr Musk took over the company, is a record high from the Irish Workplace Relations Commission in such a case.
In his email to staff in November, 2022, Mr Musk said: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” In the email, he asked staff to click “yes” on a link if they were sure they wanted to be part of the ‘new twitter’, adding that those who did not do so by 5pm the following day would ‘receive three months of severance’.
Gary Rooney did not click on the ‘yes’ button. Today he stands to be €550,000 better off at the expense of X.
HR Team Director Martina McAuley says the case is a high profile example of the need to follow a fair procedure to ensure compliance with employment legislation.
“It is important that business owners and employers are aware of this outcome and that when they are going through a period of restructure they follow fair procedures to ensure that they are not exposed to costly tribunal awards.
“When these dismissals took place they made the news headlines and small businesses may have thought that they too could dismiss employees in a similar fashion. This decision by the WRC demonstrates the risk involved when fair procedures are not followed.
“The moral of the story for employers is to beware of adopting a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ attitude to the commercial decisions of billionaire entrepreneurs or big businesses when it comes to employment law. Whereas the big businesses may have the financial capacity to pay for such decisions, smaller businesses will not.”
