‘It's the employer's own rule, so if it’s not applying it evenhandedly, it's out the window’: lawyer
“Policy doesn't have the force of law, but it's the way that things are done inside an organization – and if an organization sets its own internal rules, it had better follow them.”
So says Richard B. Johnson, partner and co-founder of Ascent Employment Law in Vancouver, after a British Columbia arbitrator found that an employer didn’t have just cause to fire a worker for not following company policies because the application and enforcement of those policies was “lackadaisical” and inconsistent.
The worker was a front station attendant for SSP Canada Food Services, a company that operates several food service counters at Vancouver International Airport. She worked at two of the locations in the airport – called Dirty Apron and Nourish by Dirty Apron - that sold baked goods. She was hired in early 2023, working both the day shift and the night shift.
On the night shift, three managers were responsible for all of the locations, with each manager responsible for four or five locations each. As a result, the managers were always busy.
All of the food products that SSP sold had best-before dates, after which they were to be thrown out. The company had an official practice for managers to look at the products each day and decide if they were waste before employees discarded them. However, since the managers were busy, this usually didn’t happen. Employees weren’t supposed to...
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