Ford employee fired after 11 years for stealing cookie he’d actually paid for

Lolz. Public corporations don't care about your well being. If there is an ROI on any action, it's worth taking and if that means no cookies because it ensure the shareholders get a fraction of a percent return, then no cookies for you.

I'm working hard to leave my current corpo. They're down to the "bring the dry pen back to get a new one" stage of bean counting. That's a sinking ship to disembark from ASAP.

Gotta milk every last cent out of us. Honestly the absurdity and cruelty only make the revolution come that much faster and if they are cruel enough we won't even have any moral hangups about it (for those that would).

Same people that expect YOU to work hard enough to generate millions in revenue while THEY take 99% of it.

If it ain't in a vending machine, it should be free.

I have definitely seen vending machines at various office over the years.

My current company contracts someone to keep a few fridges and shelves in the break room stocked with higher grade convenience-store style food. The prices are pretty cheap, so I suspect they actually lose money on the deal. If I grabbed some food and just walked away with it, that would technically be stealing. I doubt they would confront me about something that small, though. Ford is obviously wrong to fire someone over a cookie.

It always seemed like a no-brainer to me to provide subsidized food for expensive salary workers who may be willing to work unpaid overtime if they don’t have to leave to get dinner, at least from a logic self-serving point of view.

This tactic goes by the lawful name of at will employment.

I think unemployment is paid to the State while they are working, no?

they did it to soon, most of them try to get rid of the employee months before they become 65

There are 35-year-olds that have worked for Ford longer.

Law suit territory. Time for a comfortable retirement.

Seems like a slam dunk case. What a joke of a company. Hope they fire everyone who thought it was smart to fire this guy. Huge waste

Wrongful termination for sure, idk about defamation. I think it'd be hard to argue being accused of stealing a cookie actually hurt your reputation in any meaningful way.

I think Kromm should give them a first hand lesson in the riddle of steel...

Should buy a Komatsu D355A and a mig welder.

200k+year is the reason, they just try to obfuscate by saying it something else, and stealing is the easiest to accuse and harder to prove. they probably expect the person to accept it and not lawyer up, because lawyers are expensive.

Under socialism, employers must supply free cookies in breakrooms.

Yep. I remember having to temporarily sit at the desk of some department head to address a network problem, whose desk was covered in paperwork involving some poor custodian who was asking for a medically necessary limited period of light duty as a result of a work-related injury, and this director's handwritten notes all over it, with shit like "if she can't do the job she shouldn't be here, let's draw a line under this," etc. It was clear exactly what they were getting at; they ALL knew the law, hence the handwritten notes and vague language. The casual nature of it was revolting.

And I hope they sued the fuck out of that company. Age discrimination is illegal as fuck.

sounds like the one in the article, and an another story i heard years back. a a stewardess was 60-70+yo in her airline job, and the airline accused her of stealing and fired her, she was earning 200k+/year plus other benefits, and she was on the verge or retiring. they knew what they were doing. they are probably figure people wouldnt notice and she would accept it, or they mightve calculated the potential lawsuit costs of firing her.(using this as a template to fire people before they even have a chance to sue).

they are like testing the waters with the 60yo, then they can apply it to other employees.

If I had to guess, I'd say we're way past the "testing" stage and doing this at industrial scale. This just happened to be the kind of egregious implementation of policy that trickles into the news cycle.

For every Kurt Kromm, I'll bet there's a dozen employees fired due parking tickets or misentered vacation or failure to meet some impossible milestone in they're performance plans. More traditional and acceptable routes for firings.

This was just a particularly lazy, sloppy execution

It's worse without unions, but setting expectations beyond capacity and pointing a camera at points of failure is key to a good turnover rate.

If you're looking at 300-400% turnover then you don't really end up with that sort of issue in the first place.

Yeah. If your company is looking that closely into your behavior, they are looking for an excuse instead of a reason.

Or as someone else here said, he was getting too close to retirement or some other kind of seniority/longevity-based benefit that the company didn't want to pay out.

I miss when you only didn't get the security deposit back

But to even think of using it as an excuse..

In Norway/most of Europe a lawyer would've had a field day with this case.

it was about his pay, benefits, retirements.

$1.95 is more than a nickel and a dime... that's a profit center for several people in the supply chain.

I've gone through psych evals in corporate hiring that ask a bunch of bullshit "would you steal a penny to feed a starving orphan" questions, intended to weed out anyone with an ounce of conscience.

They mostly just teach you to lie to your boss

Imagine having cookies in the break room that you have to pay $2 for... wtf.

they will just make some other excuse to "fire" him. like his attendance, his workload, being mean to others,,,etc.

Uhhh.... It didn't help him as much as it should have, but my understanding from watching a video about this yesterday is that he already got paid back for the time after he was fired because of the union. So, it did help him some.

UAW is an awful organization that's basically a "good old boy"'s club. Most reps are just a revolving door of former execs from the Big 3 anyway who work with their buddies to keep workers at bay.

Getting off topic but I'm all for increasing Union membership in this country, but think we also need to discuss the rot that's in the ones that do exist.

union usually dont help when a person gets fired for stealing wether thats true or not.

What would they help him with though? He had proven he has paid and they reversed course on the firing.

There always used to be a joke in the UK about Fords being cheap on the second-hand market. You could get parts easily, so they were cheap to maintain, as well. But you'd see the ads saying 50k miles, new clutch, new exhaust, new CVs, bearings, etc. because they fell apart all the time. This was back when Japanese cars were proving to the world how reliable cars could be. Nobody I knew wanted a Ford, though some people got them if they were really cheap.

I had two family cars that were Fords in the late 80s and 90s. One (Taurus) had its front windshield randomly explode on a hot summer day, and its oil pan later rusted out. The other (Mustang) somehow had no back seat floor by the time it was 10 years old (completely rusted out).

I have no idea how they treated their employees back then, but you weren't missing much when it came to the vehicles unless you're talking about a time before I was around.

It’s a shame. My parents owned two ford vans for my entire childhood and both served my family extremely well for more than two decades. I have owned three and they have all been excellent. I can’t say that I’d buy a new ford with everything that I’ve read recently.

SAME, FAM!! \o/

fuck ford, good goddamn riddance.

They really had some great marketing hold on young people.

But the executives can get away with stealing an employee's pension that he actually earned.

Making short-sighted decisions that fails, lays off 8,000 employees, gets a govt bail out, flies home on the corporate jets, uses the bailout money to give a huge bonus and buy a new corporate jet

Companies love firing people rather than letting them retire. Hell even the government loves to do it. It happened to my dad, he got forced into early retirement after 30 years of government service. The union really failed him.

Ah yes. That tasty "cheese product".

The mental image i got is that they are kicking their own ass using a broken leg. Pretty accurate if you ask me - it hurts doubly every time you do it.

thier own ass, so thats good.

when has ford ever been the good guy

Would such a suit make sense, given they reversed course after he has proven he did pay?

Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56, '57, '58, '59 automobile

It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67, '68, '69, '70 automobile

That and surveillance cameras, apparently.