Constellis fired a man for yelling at his boss about bullets flying back at his students’ faces, after those students had already been hit.
They Warned People Would Die. So the Company Fired the Guy Who Warned Them.
The Company, The Job, and The Problem Nobody Wanted to Fix
Constellis is a private security contractor. The company employs armed security officers and deploys them to protect federal government properties. It also runs weapons training programs, where instructors like Michael Macri taught students how to handle a variety of firearms.
The training happened on live firing ranges. Real bullets, real guns, real danger. Management set the curriculum, handed instructors “range cards” detailing every drill, and required instructors to follow those cards precisely. Instructors had almost no independent authority; they could not change the training program, could not discipline students outside narrow safety rules, and could not make any decisions about a student’s future in the program without supervisor sign-off.
Then people started getting hit by their own ammunition. During live shooting exercises, bullets were ricocheting back from the range and striking the people pulling the triggers, along with the instructors standing nearby. This was not a theoretical risk. Several shooters had already been struck by bullet fragments before anyone in management moved to address the problem.
A Paper Trail of Panic and Inaction
Macri and several of his instructor colleagues documented the danger in writing and sent a formal letter to Constellis management. The letter did not mince words. It called the ricochet problem a “serious but correctable life hazard” and warned that it could lead to “injury or death.” The instructors demanded an immediate fix.
Constellis’s response: temporarily close the most dangerous range and claim the problem was fixed. The ricochet problem persisted. When Macri confronted his supervisors in a meeting about the company’s failure to actually solve the problem, he raised his voice. He yelled. Constellis suspended him and later fired him, citing “insubordination.”
The company that trains federal security officers to handle deadly weapons punished an instructor for getting loud about the fact that those weapons were injuring people in their own facility. That is the story.
The First Warning Shot Was a COVID Complaint
The ricochet letter was not Macri’s first act of speaking out. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he raised concerns during a staff meeting about Constellis’s ban on personal protective equipment for instructors and students. The company’s response was telling: shortly after Macri raised the PPE issue, a supervisor formally documented an unrelated workplace infraction allegedly committed by Macri months earlier.
The timing of that documentation matters. It suggests a pattern: Macri speaks up, management reaches into the file to find something to use against him. This pattern repeated itself more dramatically after the ricochet letter.
The Timeline: From Warning to Termination
The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Measure
When a worker raises a safety complaint and gets fired for it, the story that ends up in a court document is about procedure and legal standards. What gets lost in those filings is what it actually feels like to show up to work every day knowing your employer had been warned about a deadly hazard, failed to fix it, and then punished the people who had the nerve to say so out loud.
Macri and his colleagues were firearms instructors. Their entire professional identity was built around safety. They were the people responsible for making sure a room full of people with loaded guns did not hurt each other. They knew what a bullet fragment traveling backward at speed could do to a human face. They had already seen people get hit. Their concern about the ricochet problem was not an abstract complaint; it was a direct response to watching their students bleed.
Management Manufactured a Paper Record to Use Against Him
The court record documents something specific and infuriating about how Constellis handled Macri’s dissent. When he raised the COVID PPE concern at a staff meeting, management did not address the concern. Instead, a supervisor promptly dug up and formally documented a workplace infraction that had allegedly occurred months earlier and had apparently not been worth writing down at the time.
That is a recognizable playbook. It is the corporate equivalent of keeping a file on someone because you know they are trouble, then opening that file the moment they become a problem. The infractions that were too minor to document in real time suddenly become urgent paperwork the moment a worker opens their mouth about something that costs the company money or inconvenience.
Yelling at Your Boss Is Not a Fireable Offense When People Are Getting Hit by Bullets
Constellis leaned hard on the word “insubordination” to justify the termination. Macri raised his voice in a meeting with supervisors. He was angry. He had written a letter warning about a life hazard. The company had claimed to fix it. The problem had persisted. His students were still at risk. He raised his voice.
The federal labor board and the federal appeals court both looked at that sequence of events and concluded that the real reason for the firing was the complaints themselves, not the tone of voice used to deliver them. The court was explicit: protected concerted activity does not require an employee to remain calm and deferential while their employer continues to expose them and their colleagues to preventable physical danger. Retaliation “need not be the only motive” for a firing to be unlawful. It only needs to be a substantial one. And here, it clearly was.
Legal Receipts: The Words That Damn Them
“The ricochet problem posed a serious but correctable life hazard to both students and instructors.” — Formal letter from Macri and fellow instructors to Constellis management, as entered into the Joint Appendix of the case record (J.A. 730)
“[The ricochet problem] could lead to ‘injury or death,’ and requested that Constellis fix this safety problem immediately.” — Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, summarizing the instructors’ formal letter to management
“Speaking out against unsafe or unlawful working conditions is one such concerted activity. The National Labor Relations Act also protects workers against employer retaliation for exercising this right.” — Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, establishing the legal baseline Constellis violated
“Macri and his coworkers lacked the ability or authority to fix the ricochet problem at the firing ranges. Instead, they had to bring their safety concerns to the attention of those at Constellis with the power to address the issues.” — Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, explaining precisely why Macri had no choice but to escalate verbally
“The ALJ further found that Constellis suspended and terminated Macri, in large part, because he had raised concerns about Constellis’s approach to personal protective equipment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing ricochet problem in the firing ranges.” — Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, summarizing the Administrative Law Judge’s findings of fact
“Retaliation need not be the only motive for the employer’s actions.” — Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, citing RGC (USA) Mineral Sands, Inc. v. NLRB; establishing that Constellis could not hide behind pretextual justifications
Societal Impact: This Is Bigger Than One Firing Range
Public Health: Live Ammunition, No Accountability
Constellis does not train hobbyists. The company contracts with the federal government to provide armed security officers for federal properties. The students at these shooting ranges are people who will go on to carry firearms in professional security roles. When the training environment itself is unsafe, the public-facing consequences extend far beyond the range.
The court record establishes that multiple people were struck by bullet fragments before the ricochet hazard was formally raised in writing. That means for some period of time, a known physical danger existed at a federally-connected weapons training facility, people were getting hurt, and management’s response was not to fix it but eventually to fire the person who kept pushing for a fix.
The individuals struck by bullet fragments are not named in the court record. Their injuries are not quantified. Their recovery is not documented. They exist in this story only as a data point establishing that the danger Macri described was real and already active. That absence of detail in the legal record does not mean their injuries were minor. It means the legal system moved on to the procedural question without stopping to fully account for what happened to actual human bodies on that range.
The Chilling Effect on Every Safety Complaint in America
What Constellis did to Macri sends a direct message to every worker in every dangerous industry who is watching. The message is: if you complain about safety conditions, we will find a way to get rid of you. We will cite insubordination. We will dig up old paperwork. We will call you a manager to strip your legal rights. We will make it expensive and exhausting to fight back.
This is not hypothetical. The case documents Constellis arguing all the way to a federal appeals court that Macri should not even be considered an employee for purposes of labor law. The company spent years and significant legal resources attempting to establish that a person who had no ability to change the curriculum, no power to discipline students, and no authority to fix a bullet ricochet hazard on his own was somehow “management” and therefore ineligible for basic workplace protections.
Economic Inequality: The Power Gap Between Worker and Corporation
Michael Macri is one person. He filed a charge with a regional labor board office. He navigated a hearing before an administrative law judge. He survived Constellis’s appeal to the full National Labor Relations Board. He then had to wait for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to enforce the order before it even had the force of law. That process, from the original complaint to the appellate decision, spanned years.
Constellis, meanwhile, is a private security contractor with federal government contracts. It had the resources to hire attorneys from large law firms, file a cross-petition for review, brief the circuit, and argue the case at the appellate level. The company deployed sophisticated legal arguments about the scope of the managerial exception, precedents from multiple federal circuits, and administrative law standards. This was not a fair fight in terms of resources.
The case also exposes how employers weaponize legal ambiguity as a delay tactic. Even when a worker is clearly protected, the question of whether they are a “managerial employee” creates enough legal uncertainty for a corporation to run out the clock, drain a worker’s finances, and make the cost of fighting back feel prohibitive to anyone watching. Macri won. But how many people in similar situations did not try, or could not afford to try?
Who Actually Had the Power to Fix This?
The Cost of a Life Metric
What Now: The Watchlist and Your Next Move
Corporate Roles Still Holding Power at Constellis
- Chief Executive Officer, Constellis: The executive ultimately responsible for the culture that fired a safety whistleblower and spent years fighting his reinstatement. [REDACTED – Not in Source]
- Head of Training Operations, Constellis / Academi Training Center: The management structure that received the ricochet warning letter, claimed the problem was fixed, and then did not fix it. [REDACTED – Not in Source]
- General Counsel, Constellis: The legal team that argued Macri was a managerial employee to strip him of his rights, knowing he had zero management authority. [REDACTED – Not in Source]
Regulatory Bodies With Authority Here
- National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): Already acted in this case. File any new retaliation complaints here. Monitor Constellis’s compliance with the reinstatement and back-pay order.
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): Has jurisdiction over workplace safety conditions including bullet ricochet hazards at live firing ranges. This case documents a known hazard that management failed to fix in a timely manner.
- Department of Defense / Federal Contract Oversight Bodies: Constellis holds federal government contracts. Federal contractors are subject to additional oversight and accountability requirements. Contract renewal processes are a pressure point.
What You Can Actually Do
Start where Macri started: with other people. He did not send a lone letter; he sent one with his coworkers. Collective action is the mechanism that gave this case its legal standing, and it is the mechanism that makes any workplace complaint harder to ignore and harder to retaliate against. Find your coworkers. Talk about what is actually happening in your workplace. Document everything, especially timelines.
If you work in a dangerous industry and your employer is ignoring a safety hazard, the NLRB’s website has a straightforward process for filing an unfair labor practice charge. OSHA has a whistleblower protection program. You do not have to be in a union to file either. Macri was not in a union. He filed anyway and won.
Support organizations doing workers’ rights litigation and mutual aid: the National Employment Law Project, worker centers in your area, and local labor councils are doing on-the-ground work that makes cases like Macri’s possible. The court was the finish line, but the organizing and documentation work that gets a case to court is where the real labor happens.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
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