Fired for ALL CAPS

on Sep 02 in Employment tagged by Trevor Hicks

I find this case very interesting, seems a woman working for an insurance company in New Zealand was fired for sending emails that included text that was in all caps, in bold font and in red or blue colors. She was giving coworkers instructions on how to fill out a form properly and was firm and direct, but doesn’t appear to have been abusive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I would find such an email very annoying, and I suspect there were other personality conflicts between her and her coworkers. But she was fired with no warning and no notice with the email as a pretext.

A company could probably get away with this legally in Texas, but I think it would find the cost in attrition and morale to be worse than the legal damages. I think we would still all quite reasonably expect to have some counseling prior to a dismissal. My guess is that her coworkers probably celebrated her absence for about a day, but then realized that really nobody is safe when an employer is willing to can people on the slightest provocation. I predict low levels of trust between the people that remain now and also probably low levels of initiative and effort. Apparently the mole that sticks its head out of the hole gets whacked.