His pay was halved and a bonus stayed unpaid - the Commission still found he chose to leave

A senior lawyer told the Fair Work Commission his employer forced him out. The Commission read his own WhatsApp messages and disagreed.

In a decision handed down on August 21, 2026, the Commission found that a senior corporate counsel at Cisco Systems Australia had not been dismissed. He had resigned - and because he chose to go, the Commission had no power to hear his claim.

The man worked for Cisco from 2015 until March 2025. His final years were shaped by serious illness, including Long COVID he caught on a work trip to Atlanta in early 2023. In March 2025 he resigned in an 11-page letter, arguing the company had breached his contract so badly that it amounted to constructive dismissal - where a worker quits but says the employer left them no real choice.

Everything turned first on one question: was he actually pushed out, or did he leave on his own? The kind of claim he brought only protects workers who were dismissed, so the Commission had to settle that before looking at anything else. It found he resigned by choice, which meant it could not hear the case, and threw the application out.

Much of his account leaned on how he read WhatsApp messages with his manager. The Commission looked at the full exchanges rather than the snippets he had quoted, and found his version did not hold up. On the record, his manager had checked in often, wished him well, and told him to take the...

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