It’s true that companies don’t like that. It’s also true that common advice to people experiencing some kind of workplace harassment or abuse or bullying is to follow up to verbal conversations in writing, and to keep your own copies of those documents in case the company decides to accidentally delete them before they get a subpoena or whatever.

So a question is then whether it’s morally sufficient for someone to be fired for this sort of behaviour. It feels to me like the reason for the firing was not really at all related to breaking the written policies in the company handbook and a lot more related to breaking the unwritten policies about stirring up trouble and dissent.