Record Workplace Relations Commission payout after Twitter offered €22,834 severance to senior Irish Twitter staffer who was deemed by company to have resigned

Twitter has been ordered to pay €550,000 compensation to a former senior executive in its Irish-based operations in what is a record award by the Workplace Relations Commission in an unfair dismissal case.

The WRC heard that the social media giant – now known as X – decided the employee had resigned when he failed to tick a box requiring him to agree to new unspecified pay and conditions within a one-day deadline in response to an email from the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, in November 2022.

In the Fork In The Road email, the billionaire told employees that 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.”

Musk then required employees to click “yes” in a link at the bottom of the email. “Anyone has [sic] not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow will receive three months of severance,” the email added, before concluding: “Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful.”

Mr Musk did not give evidence, despite the complainant Gary Rooney’s request for the WRC to use its powers to compel him to attend as a witness. Twitter’s senior director of human resources Lauren Wegman told the WRC the “Fork in the Road” email was sent to 270 employees in Ireland, of whom 235 had clicked “yes”. Ms Wegman said the remuneration and duties of these staff had been unchanged.

She did not accept that any reasonable person would have understood their pay was being reduced based on the information made available.

Mr Rooney claimed his employment was terminated by Twitter International Unlimited Company after he failed to click “yes” in reply to Mr Musk’s email. Mr Rooney said the company subsequently refused to engage with him or his solicitor.

Mr Rooney’s legal representatives said that to accept Twitter’s argument that the failure to tick a box constituted a resignation would “represent a radical change in employment law in Ireland”.

However, the company maintained that Mr Rooney had made a conscious decision to not click “yes” in response to Mr Musk’s “clear and straightforward” email when he knew that by doing so he was resigning his role.

In a 73-page ruling, WRC adjudication officer Michael MacNamee, concluded Mr Rooney’s employment came to an end solely because he did not click “yes” to the email. The decision not to click “yes”, Mr MacNamee said, was not capable of constituting an act of resignation.

The WRC official said Mr Rooney was available for work but was prevented from accessing his work by Twitter.

He ruled the purported acceptance by Twitter of what was wrongly characterised as the complainant’s resignation constituted a dismissal “in fact and in law”.

Mr MacNamee said the dismissal was unfair due to the absence of any substantial grounds to justify termination of Mr Rooney’s employment. He also found that Mr Rooney had not caused or contributed to his dismissal by failing to click “yes”.

He said allowing 24-hours to respond to the email could not be considered “reasonable notice” to allow an employee to make an informed decision on how to respond to it, even if HR support was readily available. “No employee when faced with such a situation could possibly be faulted for refusing to be compelled to give an open-ended unqualified assent to any of the proposals,” said Mr MacNamee.

The WRC official said Mr Musk’s email seemed to be an attempt to secure agreement to an alteration to the terms and conditions of employment or to elicit volunteers for redundancy.

Evidence in the case was heard over five days of hearings at the WRC between November 2023 and May 2024.

Twitter denied that Mr Rooney had been dismissed and claimed he should be found 100 per cent responsible for his loss by failing to click “yes” to Mr Musk’s email.

Mr Rooney had worked for over nine years with Twitter before being deemed to have resigned on November 18th, 2022 from his role as director of “Source to Pay”.

The WRC heard he was given a document of a draft severance agreement worth €22,834 on December 7th, 2022 which would be withdrawn if it was not accepted within two weeks. His employment was officially terminated on December 18th, 2022.

The complainant had a total compensation package at the time of €369,937, including a basic salary of €137,000 plus a 30 per cent performance bonus.

Following the termination of his employment by Twitter, Mr Rooney was unable to find a comparable position but did ultimately begin working with a bank in September 2023 on a package worth €129,897, including a basic salary of €104,500.

His lawyers claimed he was entitled to the maximum award of two years’ remuneration given his losses of €739,874 exceeded the maximum figure allowable for unfair dismissal under the law.

Ordering Twitter to pay Mr Rooney total compensation of €550,131 for the unfair dismissal, Mr MacNamee said the amount was calculated on a basis that provided €200,000 for prospective future loss of earnings. The WRC dismissed a separate claim by Mr Rooney that he was entitled to a performance bonus for 2022 on the basis it was “not well-founded”.

The previous highest award for an unfair dismissal case before the WRC was €440,000 which tech firm, Hyph Ireland (previously Xhail Ireland) was ordered to pay earlier this year to musician, composer and entrepreneur, Mick Kiely, after he had been fired as the company’s chief executive in 2021.

However, former RSA insurance chief executive Philip Smith was awarded the maximum two years’ compensation - a total of €1.25 million - by its predecessor, the Employment Appeals Tribunal in 2015.

Reporting on:irishtimes.com