Casino Fires Dilbert Fan Unjustly, Judge Rules
David Stewart, a casino worker at the Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa, gambled his bosses would have a sense of humor about themselves. It wasn't the sharpest bet ever made.
After discovering the casino would be going through a series of employee layoffs and cutbacks, Stewart posted a "Dilbert" comic strip on a bulletin board at the casino. "Dilbert", the creation of cartoonist Scott Adams, is a strip set at a white-collar office which ridicules corporate structures and policies. In the strip Stewart posted, the character Dilbert asks "Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?"
Managers at the casino found the comic so offensive that they invested company time to review surveillance tapes, discovering that Stewart was the employee who had posted the strip. He was fired as a result, despite Stewart's claim that he was just trying to make people smile in a somber time.
The story leaked to national media when Stewart put in a claim for unemployment benefits. The casino challenged his right to unemployment, saying his conduct had been so offensive that termination was necessary and proper. However, a judge sided with Stewart on the case.
Adams seemed to find the whole story amusing, saying that the moral might be that if you're going to criticize your bosses, best be sure not to leave a trail. He stated, "In order to get his unemployment benefits, the perpetrator had to convince a judge that he was merely stupid, not intentionally misbehaving. "
While Stewart may have been guilty of speaking too forthrightly, managers who run a casino so badly they have to lay off employees due to lack business should have much more to worry about than jokes posted in the break room. Perhaps if the people who run Catfish Bend Casino were as dogged in their approach to business as in their search and persecution of the prankster, revenues would be booming, and hirings, not firings, would be the topic of the day.
