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A company which fired a worker over an unpaid bar of chocolate was forced to pay him €5,600 in compensation. The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) ordered the facility services provider to pay the cleaner €5,600 after finding he was unfairly dismissed.
The employee was summarily dismissed on January 26 of last year after failing to initially pay for the chocolate at the staff canteen in October 2015. The canteen uses cashless system and workers buy items with a card. The employee took the chocolate without initially paying and sat down to have his break, he had only 35c on his card which was insufficient to pay. When he was approached by a canteen employee he then borrowed a colleague’s card and paid for the item.
In her ruling in which no parties were named in the case, WRC adjudicator Aideen Collard found the decision by the firm’s sector director to dismiss the worker at a disciplinary hearing to be a fundamental procedural flaw and indicative of predetermination without taking any time to consider his responses or whether a lesser form of disciplinary action would be appropriate.
Ms Collard said that having found both the substantive decision to dismiss and the procedures adopted to be objectively unreasonable and unfair, “I am satisfied that the employer has not discharged the onus of showing that the worker’s dismissal was fair”. Ms Collard said that in circumstances where it is undisputed that the worker had drawn negative attention to himself meriting a complaint from the canteen company to his employer, “I am satisfied that he contributed to some degree to the circumstances giving rise to his dismissal and consequent losses”.
Counsel on behalf of the worker submitted that the company’s dismissal “was totally disproportionate to the alleged conduct in question”.
It was accepted that he had only taken a bar of chocolate which he had paid for before leaving the canteen, and this could not amount to theft.
In his evidence to the WRC, the worker confirmed that he had no intention of stealing the chocolate bar, having sat near the tills and had paid for it before leaving the vicinity.
