We all have bad days at work. There are times that we are so preoccupied with the workload or bothered by matters outside of the job, to the point that the quality of our output is comprised. Or worst, we lose our jobs for one mistake due to a bad work day.
Perhaps the worst has happened to a service engineer who worked for a plant-hire business. Allegedly, he fell asleep during a meeting in June 2016 and when the firm’s technical manager noticed this, the engineer in question was awaken and gave ‘the finger’ to his boss.
It was a simple ‘wakey wakey’ that got the service engineer triggered. The boss claims that they were in a work meeting when the engineer mentally disappeared because he was sleeping. Only to wake him up, get the gesture, and close his eyes again.
GIF via Giphy
All of the members of that work meeting were shocked, needless to say. All were silent after the service engineer made the rude response.
As a consequence, the service engineer was dismissed for gross misconduct. In an in adjudication hearing of the Workaplce Relations Commission or WRC, the branch manager said that not dismissing the employee would have led to “chaos with no discipline.”
Feeling that it was an unfair dismissal, the sacked worker turned to WRC and defended that the branch manager had spoken over him at the meeting and he had felt disrespected.
He further explained that he was not sleeping – he was sleeping closing his eyes and lowering his head as a response to what the branch manager allegedly did to him. He was still listening, he claimed.
And the sacked engineer did not deny doing the dirty finger, but he believed that the company’s response of firing him was disproportionate.
GIF via Giphy
There is some history about the complainant and the boss: the former raised concerns about the payment of overtime, which constituted a verbal protected disclosure to the latter a month before the sacking incident.
The service engineer suggested that it was not the dirty finger that was the reason for his dismissal. He claimed that it was an angry reaction to the disclosure, and that he just used what happened to the meeting as an excuse.
However, the company denied there had been a protected disclosure and that the complainant’s concerns were merely “grievances”, which had no bearing on the dismissal.
Source: Irish Times
