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Fresh off of annihilating a tenth of its workforce, Atlassian is being accused of illegally firing an employee, Bloomberg reports.
Federal prosecutors allege that the Australian software firm fired engineer Denise Unterwurzacher for criticizing its CEO over his “re-leveling” plan to effectively demote and layoff many of its staff members — and for his flippant attitude.
The firing, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board argue, amounts to an illegal retaliation against an employee. And if allowed to stand, it “would upend well-established principles” under US law, NLRB lawyer Colton Puckett said at an early March hearing in Austin, Texas, per a transcript obtained by Bloomberg. Labor laws protect an employee’s right to voice criticism and take collective action at work.
Unterwurzacher’s firing centered on a June 2023 incident that took place during an “Ask Me Anything” video call with employees. While the company’s billionaire cofounder and at-the-time co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes explained that only a few employees would be fired during his re-leveling plan, he was sitting in the headquarters of the Utah Jazz, a basketball team he co-owned.
“Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing, per Bloomberg.
Unterwurzacher, along with many of her colleagues, vented her frustrations in a company Slack channel called “Outrage Notification,” a play on “outage notifications,” mocking what she framed as the out-of-touch nature of Cannon-Brookes’ remarks.
“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
Days later, Atlassian fired Unterwurzacher, claiming she had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.”
Her lawyers think differently: Unterwurzacher was acting in the spirit of one of Atlassian’s professed “core” values, “Open company, no bullsh*t.”
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