A senior manager with Twitter awarded €550,131 by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) after he had been deemed by the company to have resigned following Elon Musk’s takeover has had the award reduced to €201,458 by the Labour Court.
Gary Rooney had worked for Twitter, now X Internet Unlimited, since 2013 and held the position of director of source-to-pay.
His departure in December 2022 followed Musk’s widely reported “fork in the road” email to employees the previous month, in which the billionaire said the company and those who worked for it needed to be “extremely hardcore”, that employees would be required to work “long hours at high intensity” and “only exceptional performance would constitute a passing grade”.
Staff were required to signal their acceptance of these requirements by ticking a box and told if they did not they would be deemed to have resigned. They were given less than two days to make their decision.
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Rooney did not tick the box but said he had not intended to resign. Instead he did not have enough information, including on issues like benefits, to make a fully informed decision and that he had tried to follow up with the company’s HR department in order to clarify what was being suggested.
The company, however, did conclude he had resigned. Despite having previously been recognised by his employer for his hard work and contribution, he was locked out of the company’s computer and security systems the day after the deadline passed.
Rooney claimed his treatment amounted to unfair dismissal and the scale of his award, then a record in an unfair dismissals case, took account of payments he was due under a restricted share unit (RSU) scheme, a form of bonus programme related to share price.
Both sides appealed aspects of the result of the WRC process, and the court rejected a claim by Rooney that he should have been due a bonus in March 2023 in respect of his performance during 2022 before his departure.
The company, meanwhile, appealed the more substantial decision on the basis, it contended, that there had been no dismissal. Even if that was not accepted, the company claimed the portion of Rooney’s award attributable to scheduled future RSU payments should be cancelled as the conditions of the scheme expressly required the recipient to still to be in the employment of the company.
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Padraic Lyons, instructed by Kenny Sullivan Solicitors, for Rooney, argued this was contrary to section 13 of the Unfair Dismissals Act, which states that provisions in an employment contract that seek to limit the application of the Act shall be void.
However, the court found that the terms attached to the RSU scheme did not restrict Rooney’s ability to take an unfair dismissals case and ultimately excluded the scheduled payments from the calculation of losses, which his legal team at put at some €630,000 in his claim.
It rejected, however, the contention by Cathy Smith, instructed by Mason Hayes and Curran, for X, that Rooney had simply availed of a choice offered to him, to depart with three months’ severance, and resigned by opting not to tick the box.
“The court finds that the conduct of the respondent (X) in setting an arbitrary deadline, not providing sufficient information for employees to make an informed decision and deeming an employee to have resigned when no intention to resign was communicated by the employee, was not reasonable conduct and on that basis finds that the complainant was dismissed,” the court, chaired by Louise O’Donnell, stated in its decision.
Rooney was found not to have contributed to his dismissal and to have made reasonable efforts to mitigate by the manner in which he sought a new job.
He got one the following September, but his total remuneration fell short of the weekly €2,908 he had been earning at X in basic pay, pension contributions and health benefits by €1,777 per month.
The court awarded him €113,419 for the period he was without employment, €47,988 for losses during an initial period with his new employer, €8,010 for a period after he had received a pay rise and €32,041 for future losses, giving a total of €201,458.
