Judge says Atlassian illegally fired employee over restructuring criticism

NLRB Administrative Law Judge Susannah Merritt ordered Atlassian to reinstate Austin engineer Denise Unterwurzacher, pay back wages, erase disciplinary records and remove policy language she found unlawful after finding the company illegally fired her for challenging a 2023 restructuring that threatened managerial changes and possible job cuts.

Unterwurzacher, a senior site reliability engineer who joined Atlassian in 2012, clashed with leadership during a June 2023 company-wide ask me anything with co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and then-chief technology officer Rajeev Rajan. After Cannon-Brookes told employees who objected to the changes to “go somewhere else” if they wanted to “nark,” Unterwurzacher posted a sarcastic Slack message referencing him appearing from the headquarters of the Utah Jazz, the N.B.A. team he partly owns.

Merritt found that Atlassian fired Unterwurzacher for protected concerted activity under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which covers workers acting together over workplace conditions. Other employees who made similar remarks in the same Slack channel that day were not disciplined, while Atlassian’s termination email pointed to a broader pattern of communications dating back to 2019.

Two versions of a severance agreement contained confidentiality and nondisparagement clauses that were too broad, and four rules in Atlassian’s Community Guidelines were unlawfully vague under the Stericycle framework. The NLRB held in McLaren Macomb that employers cannot use severance agreements to make workers broadly waive their labor rights.

On March 11, 2026, Atlassian said it would cut about 1,600 jobs, or roughly 10% of its workforce, to fund investments in artificial intelligence and enterprise sales. Atlassian argued it had the right to fire Unterwurzacher because her comments were a personal attack rather than protected workplace speech, and the administrative law judge’s ruling can still be appealed to the full National Labor Relations Board.