A Christmas Eve Facebook post cost a mine worker his job

Marc Waters was a production operator at the Mt Arthur open-cut coal mine in the Hunter Valley, and one of the elected health and safety representatives for his crew of about 200. In the week before Christmas 2017 the mine made several different decisions about whether it would run on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Mr Waters was not rostered on, but colleagues and contract workers kept asking him what was happening.

On 22 December he posted on Facebook: 'All Xmas and boxing day shifts are off'. After he learned the next day that the shifts were going ahead, he deleted it. At about 4.30 pm on Christmas Eve, after hearing that a union safety official had issued a direction to suspend mining, he posted: 'Xmas & Boxing days shifts are off for good'. The mine decided not to comply with the direction, and the shifts went ahead. He deleted that post too, but never posted a correction.

He was dismissed on 22 January 2018. He argued that the post was made at home, out of hours, and as part of his safety role. Commissioner Saunders disagreed. The post was about work shifts, aimed at his work group, and broke BHP's code against unauthorised commentary on social media. The Commissioner rejected his explanation that he posted to 'stop confusion': if that had been his aim, he would have posted the true position once he knew it.

There were points in his favour. He showed genuine remorse, and no worker was shown to have missed a shift because of the post. But he was already on a final written warning from 2015, for deliberately driving trucks slowly during enterprise bargaining. The dismissal was not harsh, unjust or unreasonable, and a Full Bench later refused him permission to appeal.