Iowa state worker who was fired for bad-mouthing her boss wins unemployment benefits

Is bad-mouthing your boss a “ubiquitous American tradition,” as the Iowa Court of Appeals once declared, or is it cause for termination?

That’s the question that confronted Iowa Workforce Development — the state agency that handles employment disputes — when one of its employees made some not-so-flattering remarks about the agency’s director, Beth Townsend.

Before she was fired last November, Trudi Snyder had worked for Workforce Development since 2010, most recently as a staff-training specialist.

Snyder was leading a training session for IWD workers last August when the group took a short break and one of the workers asked Snyder about her experience working the agency booth at the Iowa State Fair the previous weekend.

According to a transcript of Snyder’s recorded comments, Snyder used the opportunity to vent about Townsend ordering her to clean off a chalkboard that was part of the agency display.

“She’s standing behind the four other people that are standing at my desk and she’s ordering me to clean the chalkboard,” Snyder told her colleagues. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got people in front of me here. It’s going to have to wait a moment.’ … I will never volunteer again because she’s just rude. She was obnoxiously rude. I’m, like, ‘Excuse me? I’m not in the military anymore.'"

During another training session a few weeks later, Snyder allegedly made negative comments about another Workforce Development employee, saying, “I’ve thought about quitting because of her. … I’m not a manager and I can be honest: She does not have any people skills. If you question her on whether she’s right or wrong, she will, like, turn redder than her head and just get totally flustered and has no good way to articulate other than — I mean, she’s got — she is the — ‘This is my way or the highway,’ and, ‘This is always the way you have to do it.’ Trust me, you guys would have all been miserable.”

In late September, Snyder was placed on administrative leave for misconduct after she allegedly responded to a manager’s directive by saying, “Heil, Hitler,” and comparing Workforce Development management to “the Gestapo.”

Later, at a hearing on the misconduct charge, Snyder reportedly told her superiors that she gives her trainees at the agency “the good, the bad and the ugly” and didn’t realize it was her job to “put a happy face on everything.”

At the time, Workforce Development officials acknowledged they hadn’t warned Snyder about her conduct and indicated they “just wanted her out of the building.”

After she was fired, Snyder applied for unemployment benefits, which Workforce Development handles for Iowa’s public and private employers.

The agency challenged Snyder’s application, claiming she was fired for job-related misconduct, which, in many cases, will disqualify a person from collecting benefits.

Last week, Administrative Law Judge Amanda Atherton ruled against Workforce Development and awarded Snyder the benefits.

“That employees complain about work, their co-workers, and their managers is a fact of life,” Atherton ruled.

She found that while Snyder “certainly exercised poor judgment in the way she expressed dissatisfaction with her work environment,” the departmental policies requiring workers to meet general standards of civility and professionalism are vague and susceptible to different interpretations.

With regard to the “Gestapo tactics” reference, Atherton pointed out that the 2016 presidential campaign of President Donald Trump used that same language in criticizing the campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz.

The phrase has “become widely used in society,” Atherton wrote.

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In her ruling, Atherton also cited past court decisions in workplace-misconduct cases, including one that reached the Iowa Court of Appeals in 2011.

That case revolved around the firing of Elizabeth Nolan, an employee of the Handicapped Development Center in Davenport.

In two private phone conversations with colleagues that took place after work hours, Nolan had described her boss as a "b----." She was subsequently fired for insubordination.

The appeals court found that while Nolan’s conduct was evidence of poor judgment and might have been cause for dismissal, it wasn’t the sort of willful misconduct that would disqualify someone from collecting unemployment benefits.

“We accept the reality that employees are not expected to be entirely docile and well-mannered at all times,” the court ruled. “Complaining about one's boss during off-hours is a ubiquitous American tradition: From Johnny Paycheck’s lament in 'Take This Job and Shove It,' that 'the foreman he’s a regular dog, the line boss he’s a fool;' to Dagwood's precarious relationship with Mr. Dithers in the comic strip 'Blondie;' to Homer's venting about Mr. Burns on 'The Simpsons.' Not all dissent by an employee should result in the denial of unemployment benefits.”