A PISS POOR PISSPOT ARGUMENT

There’s an old joke about ‘who’s running this hold-up… you or Mr. Kelly’.

These days, if you applied that to business you would ask the question: Who is running this  business? The boss, the shareholders, the state government, the federal government, the tax office, the regulators, the unions? Or a combination of the lot – except the bosses and the shareholders.

There’s a classic case in the news today. A drunken worker was sacked by Carlton & United  after stealing a bottle of vodka and being found drunk in the entertainment room at the CUB distribution centre in Sydney.

To make things worse do you know what job Philip Blunt had with CUB? He was an occupational health and safety officer.  Blunt claimed unfair dismissal and yesterday the Industrial Relations Commission not only ruled that he must be reinstated  to his $70,000 a year job and  that CUB must cover about two years of back pay.

One of the Brunt’s excuses for heavy drinking was the rising stress levels at work. And the Commission lectured the company for not having a better employee assistance program to help workers suffering from problems like heavy drinking.

Pray tell, what more could they do? Their occupational health and safety officer was the drunk in question. And he was a thief to boot. A lot of big drinkers, even alcoholics, can hide their addiction at work. They can work, apparently efficiently with a skinful even if they only need a daily top up.

What the Blunt decision means is that a company cannot sack an employee for being drunk on the job unless, I guess, they can prove their work is suffering or that they are taking drink-related days off or they are involved in sexual harassment cases.

Presumably this does not apply to people in front-line safety jobs like airlines pilots.  But what hope does a company have if you can’t sack a safety and occupational health officer when he is working around dangerous distribution centre equipment like forklifts and pallets?

You could say, harking back to more ignorant days, that booze companies only have themselves to blame. There was a time when free beer flowed freely during meal breaks and a blind eye was turned to workers taking cases of bottles home.

The same way I guess that cigarette companies like Rothman’s used to require their PR staff to smoke and used to pile them up with cartoons of freebies for journalists and others.

But times have changed. The Industrial Relations Commission obviously doesn’t think so.

Imagine the legal mess if Blunt had caused an accident and a fellow worker had sued CUB for negligence because they kept a drunk safety and occupational hazards officer on the job?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007