British Apple Worker Sacked For Facebook Posts

An Apple employee who was sacked after he criticised his job and the company’s products on Facebook, has lost his appeal against his dismissal.

Samuel Crisp claimed unfair dismissal, but the tribunal ruled that although his sacking was harsh, Apple was perfectly within its rights.

Unfair Dismissal

Crisp, who worked as a specialist in a branch of the Apple Store in Norwich, posted series of rants about the iPhone and the company.

In one such tirade, he referenced the company’s tagline when it began to sell Beatles songs on iTunes which read “Tomorrow is just another day which you’ll never forget”. He responded, “Tomorrow’s just another day that hopefully I will forget.”

Apparently Crisp had become disillusioned after missing out on a possible transfer to the US and his boss, Lindsay Cruickshank, was alerted to Crisps’ activity when a colleague and Facebook friend who had seen the posts mentioned it. When he was suspended, Crisp told Cruickshank, “I could do without losing my job” to which he replied “That’s not what this tells me.”

The tribunal sided with Apple as it had a clear social media policy which banned critical remarks about the company as it could potentially damage its image, which was so central to its success.

“We take into account their position that the Facebook posts were not truly private and could in fact have been forwarded very easily with the claimant having no control over this process,” said the tribunal.

Earlier this year, a survey found that nearly half of British businesses have formally banned access to social networks in the workplace because they feared damage to their reputation as a result of derogatory comments.

Last year Facebook reached half a billion users, just six years after it launched, but a third of UK companies have blocked social networks because of security concerns.