A sweet tooth can land you in a sticky spot!
A tribunal has upheld a company's dismissal of a worker for stealing sweets.
The man was fired from his retail warehouse job here in Ireland after helping himself to a box of Celebrations.
The Slovak national then brought an unfair dismissal case against his unnamed employer, a large food retailer employing 3,000 people in over 100 stores.
But the Irish Examiner reports that the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has dismissed his action, concluding that the decision by the company to sack him was fair.
The man was one of three workers to eat the Celebrations on the night of December 4th 2016. The company spotted him on CCTV taking the sweets out of a crate on three occasions and eating them.
The crate was for the redistribution of damaged stock for charity, reprocessing or disposal.
The worker was suspended and subsequently fired from his €32,306 per year job for "gross misconduct for theft of company property on foot of his having removed and consumed stock without permission". Another worker was also let go while the third employee resigned.
In his unfair dismissal case, the man said that he thought he could take the sweets as they were in an unmarked box. He admitted that he had made a mistake, but denied that it was theft.
However, the WRC said that while the dismissal was harsh for a first offence, the worker was fully aware of the company's zero tolerance policy towards theft no matter what the scale.
