bad behavior at work This may mean the company fires the employee who committed it, but this decision will depend on the severity of the incident. There are therefore regulations and agreements which specify these types of questions.
However, there may be exceptional situations in which the company considers that a rule has been violated but the employee believes the opposite and takes legal action in the event of a violation. get fired without agreeing.
This is exactly what happened with an employee of a Mercadona supermarket in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo). As Diario Sur reports, the employee approached the “Ready to eat” section while the store was closed and proceeded to eat a croquette which was in a cart of products ready to be thrown away, because they had not been sold all day.
Fired for eating a kibble that was no longer going to be sold
At the time, colleagues had reported this behavior and the worker admitted to the coordinator what he had done. This employee He had been with the company for 16 years and held the position of managerHowever, Mercadona considered that eating a kibble that was going to be thrown away while the supermarket was closed was a more than justified reason to dismiss his employee.
He did not accept and appealed to the courts, which have now declared the dismissal inadmissible. The Superior Court of Justice of Castile-La Mancha not only indicated this, but also condemned the companyobliging it to reinstate the employee in the same position and under the same conditions or, instead, to grant him a compensation of 39,702.17 eurosaccording to the media cited.
The Mercadona agreement indicates that “the consumption of any product without having previously paid for it implies that this product has a retail price that the worker has not reached”, but the magistrates considered that the behavior of the worker does not was not criminal in indicating that the. kibble ingested It had no market value, “not even negligible, since the same waste destined for garbage could not be offered for sale to the public.”
Another assessment of justice is that the agreement speaks of the “diversion of the company’s products intended for trash or promotion”, being “products”, in the plural, and not just a product. Diario Sur reports that the no diversion “when there was no legitimate possession of the product” and “there is even less the essential motivation of profit to be able to speak of such misappropriation, nor a correlative impoverishment or material damage to the company, when the product (the kibble) has no value » None on the market at the time the complainant consumed it.
Justice considers that this is an exceptional, one-off and sporadic event.
Thus, the judgment included the following, always indicated by the aforementioned media: “The fact is simpler: on July 8 at 10:00 p.m., he consumed a kibble from the blister intended for the trash, without any concealment, recognizing this fact when askedbeing an exceptional, one-off and sporadic event, and knowing the order and the instruction of the company of its prohibition, which, in the opinion of this judge, constitutes a serious breach of art. 33B)4 “a simple disobedience to his superiors” “which would allow the company to impose the corresponding sanction for this type of offender but in no case to impose the most serious sanction in the world of work such as the dismissal of the worker.”
Therefore, justice recognizes that the employee could deserve a warning or sanctionbut this should not have reached the dimension of dismissal of the employee.
