The first time I heard someone tell a supervisor to go to hell — literally, not the polite version — I was standing on the assembly line at Chrysler’s Windsor plant, 18 years old and just naïve enough to think workplace profanity was reserved for R-rated movies.
A veteran line worker, frustrated by what he considered a bullying supervisor, unleashed a string of words that would make a longshoreman blush. The foreperson barely blinked. Just another Tuesday in manufacturing as we cobbled together Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyageurs.
That was decades ago, and I’ve since learned that the F-bomb has travelled well beyond the factory floor. It’s in boardrooms and Zoom calls, in Slack channels and performance reviews. Not always. Not everywhere. But certainly more than our employee handbooks acknowledge.
Which brings us to Saskatoon, where an arbitrator recently decided that telling your supervisor to “f— off” during a heated meeting isn’t necessarily a career-ending move.
Before the pearl-clutchers start drafting termination letters, let’s be clear: the cultural bridging facilitator at Saskatoon Open Door Society who uttered those words wasn’t celebrated for her vocabulary. Her conduct was deemed inappropriate and serious. But context, it turns out, matters in labour law.
The worker’s outburst came at the end of an 18-month deterioration in her relationship with her supervisor. What started as a “cordial and professional” dynamic unravelled after a relatively minor error in January 2023: she sent an unapproved email. The supervisor’s response? Raised voice. What witnesses later described as “yelling.”
From there, the relationship became toxic in that slow-motion way workplace disasters often do. A May 2023 performance review turned contentious, with the supervisor again raising her voice while questioning the worker’s self-assessment. A union representative who attended called it “disrespectful,” noting the worker appeared “defeated, quiet, beaten down and dismayed.”
By July 2024, when the final confrontation occurred, both parties were primed for combustion. During a meeting about a planned presentation on discrimination — irony noted — the supervisor made negative comments about Turkey, where the worker’s husband was from. The worker responded with comments about Iran, linked to the supervisor’s heritage. The worker accused her supervisor of nepotism, noting five of the last nine hires were of Iranian descent.
The supervisor’s response, according to various witnesses, was either “you’d better shut your mouth before you get into bigger trouble,” “shut up, you are a racist, get out,” or “you need to do your work and shut up.” The worker slammed her notebook and delivered her profane exit line.
The supervisor fired back with her own expletive — “f— your face” or “for your face,” depending on who you ask.
Here’s what the employer got wrong: they treated the outburst as an isolated incident of insubordination rather than the predictable outcome of prolonged mismanagement. The worker had been employed since January 2018 with no prior disciplinary record. She was 60 years old, facing special economic hardship, and had reached what she described as a “fight or flight” state after 18 months of escalating tension.
The arbitrator saw what the employer missed: “The Grievor cannot fairly be found to be solely or mainly responsible for the degeneration of the meeting.” Both parties used profane language. Both made inflammatory statements. The argument lasted 30 minutes because nobody had the judgment to call it off.
This isn’t about whether workplace profanity is acceptable. It’s not, and the arbitrator never suggested otherwise. But the case raises questions about what we’re really managing when we manage performance and behaviour.
Are we addressing problems when they’re small and fixable, or are we documenting incidents for eventual termination? Are we creating environments where people can name tensions before they explode, or are we letting relationships fester until someone snaps? And when the explosion finally comes, are we asking who lit the match or who poured the gasoline?
The worker acknowledged at the hearing that if she could do it again, she would have called off the meeting and involved a union representative. That’s the kind of reflection that comes when you’ve had time to think, when you’re no longer in fight-or-flight mode, when your amygdala isn’t running the show.
The employer, meanwhile, focused on her failure to demonstrate remorse and declared the relationship “irreparably damaged.” As if relationships break all at once, rather than in a hundred small fractures over 18 months.
I’ve noticed something in my years covering workplace disputes: we’re very good at documenting inappropriate behaviour and very poor at examining the conditions that produce it. We have detailed policies about respectful workplace conduct and almost no muscle memory for the kind of honest, difficult conversations that prevent meltdowns.
Yes, profanity has become more common in professional settings. The S-word, F-word, even the C-word have worked their way into language in ways that would have scandalized previous generations. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. But it’s real.
What’s also real is this: words matter less than patterns, and patterns reveal culture. When an arbitrator overturns a termination for profanity, they’re not condoning the language. They’re saying the employer failed to manage the relationship long before the language became a problem.
The facilitator will likely face suspension when the arbitrator determines an appropriate penalty. She’ll return to work, if reinstatement is ordered, knowing exactly how close she came to losing everything. And the employer? They’ll have learned an expensive lesson about the difference between punishing an outburst and preventing one.
In labour law as in life, you rarely get fired for one bad sentence. You get fired because nobody addressed the bad paragraph, the bad page, the bad chapter that came before it.
