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Do Deliberate Safety Infractions By Mentally Disabled Worker Warrant Termination?
A company investigates several incidents at its brewery and finds that one worker is responsible for them. The company interviews the worker, who eventually admits to breaking the arm of a chair, jamming bottle caps into the stop buttons on machinery, deliberately smashing air pressure valves on equipment, hiding a bottle opener in an expensive bottle washing machine and removing light bulbs from emergency stop lights on equipment. These actions endanger expensive equipment and co-workers and violate company rules and, in some cases, OHS law. Two psychologists examine and test the worker and conclude that although he isn’t “mentally retarded” and doesn’t have any mental illness or personality disorder, he does have limited intellectual abilities and is a “slow learner.” The union argues that this condition makes the worker mentally disabled under human rights law and that terminating him would violate the company’s duty to accommodate the worker to the point of “undue hardship.”
QUESTION
Can the company fire the worker?
- No, because the worker is mentally disabled.
- Yes, because given the safety concerns the worker’s conduct raises, retaining him would be an undue hardship for the company.
- No, but it can discipline him short of termination.
- Yes, because the worker isn’t mentally disabled and so the company has no duty to accommodate him.
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