A former insurance manager has been awarded an unfair dismissal payout after he was sacked for storing his sex tape and downloading pornography on his work computer.
The former executive, who worked for a brokerage in Port Macquarie, Australia, was awarded $10,000 AUD, after it was determined that his employer had not made it explicitly known that downloading porn was not allowed.
The ex-worker’s phone records and internet search history revealed that as well as downloading porn from the internet, he had stored a personal sex tape and explicit images of himself performing sex acts,
WA Today reported.
Despite this, at a Fair Work Commission hearing, Commissioner Ian Cambridge said that downloading porn at work was not automatically a fireable offence.
The worker, who was sacked in January, defended his actions by claiming that he had downloaded the porn while he was ‘on a lunch break’ or ‘outside work hours and work premises’.
The man added that he ‘probably downloaded some of the pornographic material while he was walking the streets of Port Macquarie’.
Commissioner Cambridge said that whilst the manager’s behaviour was ‘questionable’, employers who didn’t want their staff to download porn onto their work computers or phones should circulate ‘specific policies’ outlining as much.
The hearing also found that the way in which the worker had been dismissed was ‘severely flawed’, because he was not given an opportunity to respond to the complaints.
The company, Smarter Insurance Brokers, was ordered to pay the sacked employee compensation amounting to about eight weeks’ wages.
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