Fair Work Australia: IT manager sacked for deliberately stopping emails from reaching the mobile phone of the organisation’s IR manager.
Fair Work Australia has upheld the St Vincent de Paul Society’s dismissal of an IT manager who deliberately stopped emails from reaching the mobile phone of the organisation’s IR manager. The dismissal was on the grounds of misconduct.
- IT Manager Sacked
Senior Deputy President Hamberger found that the IT Manager, Mr. Williams, had deliberately disabled his employer’s ActiveSync software with the effect of denying the Workplace Relations Manager, Mr. McInerney, access to his email on his mobile devices. The IT manager disabled the system following an argument with Mr. McInerney about
the organisation’s motor vehicle policy. Calamity, an IT security company, investigated the IT Manager’s actions and confirmed that he had disabled the ActiveSync software.
Senior Deputy President Hamberger said he found Mr. Williams to be an unreliable witness, and he proceeded to accept that the IT Manager had accessed the email accounts of a number of employees, without their permission or knowledge.
Calamity’s investigation indicated that he had concentrated on the accounts of the
Workplace Relations Manager, Mr. McInerney, and St Vincent de Paul NSW Chapter Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Miller.
Senior Deputy President Hamberger found the IT Manager’s conduct had been “completely at odds” with his employer’s reasonable expectation that he act with a high degree of integrity and honesty. Disabling the ActiveSync and the unauthorised access to email accounts were actions that constituted “clear instances of misconduct“, he said, and this was reinforced by Mr. Williams’ lack of honesty in his response to the allegations.
Mr. William’s alleged that he had been bullied by the Workplace Relations Manager, however, Senior Deputy President Hamberger found no evidence to support the IT Manager’s allegations, “I indicate for the record that I saw no evidence that that the [IR manager] had been bullied by anyone“.
Mr Mark Williams v St Vincent de Paul Society [2011] FWA 6457 (27 September 2011)
Comments
One response to “Fair Work Australia: IT manager sacked for deliberately stopping emails from reaching the mobile phone of the organisation’s IR manager.”
I have been informed that the Workplace Relations Manager has since left. There are a lot of people who are pleased he has left his position, me included as I was once on the receiving end of one of his cease and desist discussing my husband and my complaint type emails. And I am not even employed by St Vincent De Paul, my husband is.
I do not approve of what Mr Williams did, if indeed he did do it. I see he was not represented by a solicitor at Fair Work which was a costly mistake whereas obviously St Vincent de Paul had their legal counsel. However the culture of bullying within the hierarchy of the charity over that period of time is well documented and indeed was investigated by a Committee set up from Canberra.
Because of that Committee I received a personal and corporate apology from the National President on behalf of the suffering my husband and I received. Of course prior to that my husband’s case of bullying was found against him and it was the Cameron McInerney who informed him of that. I was told that my own complaint was disbelieved by Graeme Roache. I had no legal support and my husband had a lawyer from Kensington Legal Centre.
My point being that average people cannot win without lawyers who are willing to take on their cases and no lawyers were willing to take my case on. And now I am one of the few who received a corporate apology. That was only through my perseverance. And we have an apology on paper but it is of little prictical help to us when my husband still suffers from anxiety and depression after his breakdown some years ago