But you say she rang up to her office and got colleague to Chang the stock handling report. Couldn't she have rang that colleague first to get him/her to check the whole thing. Must have been someone in the office who could have done it.
It is sad that she lost her job, but I feel that it was the right decision.
Once a culture of ignoring safety regulations 'in the interests of the company' becomes established, it is all too easy for that to become not only acceptable, but encouraged and eventually, almost inevitably, a serious injury or worse will occur.
Safety must always trump efficiency, and a company is, in my view, to be applauded for making this absolutely clear to their employees, thus showing the employees that their well being is important to the company.
Perhaps, at her appeal, she could have been reinstated but be placed under a written warning that any further breaches, for whatever reason, would lead to dismissal.
Gonegirl, her job share who normally takes over from her had reported sick the previous day, so their was no one else readily available to go down to the warehouse and check.
GrandmaMoira, gross misconduct is allegations are often brought against employees, especially when they have endangered other people.
Presumably the company has a scale of disciplinary action.
If it does not then she should have a case to argue.
If it does & she went against it then no matter how good her intention was , they probably have no choice but to dismiss her.
I don't know the law or the company rules but I would have thought that most employers would have put a warning on her file rather than immediate dismissal. I thought immedidate dismissal was for things such as theft.
If she left work at 2.30 why couldn't she have emailed someone else to check on this?
This matter has caused much debate within our office, so I am wondering what people outside our industry think of this safety issue which has seen a young person dismissed from her employment.
The employee (a young female single parent) had been employed in an office administration role within a large distribution centre. Her hours were 09:45 am until 2:30 pm in which it was essential that she left promptly at that time so as to collect her six-year-old daughter from school.
Approximately two weeks ago just prior to the end of her shift, she noticed an error in stock control on the system. Six pallets of a product was being shown as having been delivered to the site but were not showing up as being in the stockholding on the warehouse racking. Realising that the error could cause a delay in loading vehicles overnight, she decided to go down to the warehouse herself and check to see if the pallets were actually there.
The standing safety instruction in the complex is that any person not permanently employed in the warehouse must report to the loading dock office supervisor prior to entering the warehouse. Due to the need to pick up her daughter on time, that instruction she did not follow and as she approached the area of the warehouse she felt the pallets should be, signs were displaying that pedestrians must not enter that area as forklifts were operating.
In the above, the employee could see that no forklifts were in the picking aisle she wished to access, so she quickly entered that area and witnessed that the pallets were actually on the racking. However, as she was hurrying away a forklift came into the aisle, the driver seen her and stopped, then gave a friendly gesture that allowed her to leave the area without him saying anything. She then rang up to her office and asked a work colleague to manually change the stock holding report on the system and left work believing she had "in going beyond the call of duty", prevented what could have been severe delays on the loading docks that night.
On reporting for work next morning, the employee was immediately told to report to the loading Dock office supervisor where she was asked to make a statement concerning her activities in the warehouse the previous day. On completing that the employee was immediately suspended from duty pending a full disciplinary hearing.
My company attended that disciplinary hearing in a safety advisory role to the employer and where gross misconduct was alleged by management against the employee. The employee stated that her actions had only been in the best interests of the company, and the only person placed at risk was herself. She added further, that action would not even have occurred had she not voluntarily gone beyond what could have reasonably expected of her at the very end of her shift. The employee was asked had she not considered the mental impact the forklift driver may have suffered had that vehicle collided with her causing severe injury. To that, she did not answer.
The employee was dismissed from her employment at the end of the hearing when she broke down pleading on the effects that would have on her and her young daughter. Her appeal against that dismissal was held yesterday (04/04/19), and at that hearing her dismissal was upheld, and again she became very distressed.
A Reginal Director took that appeal and informed her that she had "some sympathy" with her argument that she only acted in the best interest of the complex, but that precedent set by previous similar safety infringement cases made her dismissal inevitable.
So, was her dismissal too harsh, or justified? I have attended many company disciplinaries brought about by safety infringements over the years, but this one left me feeling upset.
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