A BP refinery worker won his job back today after being sacked for parodying the company with a clip from a film about Hitler.
Scott Tracey used the popular meme from 2004 film Downfall — in which Hitler confronts his generals in his bunker — to portray scenes from company wage negotiations.
The video was posted on a closed Facebook site and titled “Hitler Parody EA Negotiations not going the [company’s] way”.
BP said the “inappropriate” video had likened managers to Hitler and Nazis, and Mr Tracey lost an unfair dismissal case which ruled that it was offensive.
But in an appeal judgment issued today, the Fair Work Commission ruled: “Anyone with knowledge of the meme could not seriously consider that the use of the clip was to make some point involving Hitler or Nazis.”
It said the meme had been used “thousands of times… for the purpose of creating, in an entirely imitative way, a satirical depiction of contemporary situations”.
“What it does do is to compare, for satirical purposes, the position BP had reached in the enterprise bargaining process as at September 2018 to the situation facing Hitler and the Nazi regime in April 1945,” the ruling added.
Australian Workers Union spokesman Daniel Walton welcomed the decision, saying employees should be able to lampoon bosses in their own time.
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