Simple as that. Not as simple as you might think... Large companies have policies. They have these policies because they don't want people breaking them. No

Simple as that. Not as simple as you might think... Large companies have policies. They have these policies because they don't want people breaking them. Now, you might say, "well, technically he broke the policy, but I don't see how..." a) he revealed any big public secrets b) he said anything we don't already know c) it did more harm than good in the form of responding to someone with a reasonable criticism d) etc... It doesn't matter. If you want to break company policy, you get permission to do so. If a large company allows people to break policies "so long as its not so bad..." they will run into problem of interpretation. Mr. X broke policy, and he got fired. Maybe it seemed reasonable at the time, maybe he did it because he cared, maybe he predicted that doing so would increase AA's business. Doesn't matter, at the end of the day, AA was well within its rights to fire him and they might well have been right to do so to stop others from speaking their mind whenever they feel like it. Don't like the system? Think it should be more careful, discriminate between helpful breaks and unhelpful ones? Want it more fair? Well, I'm sure a lot of people do, and many of them have probably tried to come up with a business model that does all this and is also efficient. Seems like they aren't being adopted by large companies... so there is probably a good reason. If you really want things to change (and I hope you do, because I agree, a lot of change would be welcomed by a lot of people) you need to propose a reasonable solution to this problem.