General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWoman Fired from Walmart for Reporting Dog in Hot Car (E-petition)
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/587/691/476/canadian-women-who-reported-dog-locked-in-a-hot-car-fired-from-her-job-at-walmart/
Target: Wal-mart
Sponsored by: Concerned Citizen
A Wal-Mart employee in Ontario was fired after she confronted a customer about leaving his dog in a hot car. The employee, Carla Cheney, spotted the situation even before she started her shift.
The man had left his dog in his car with the windows rolled up almost all the way. Cheney told him that he should leave his dogs like that and he said it was none of her business. She then told him that next time she would just call the police.
Soon thereafter, she was called into her manager's office, who told her that she must talk to him before addressing those situations in the future. She refused, saying that if she sees something unsafe, she just had to do something about it. She was then terminated from her position.
Please sign the petition today telling Wal-Mart not to punish employees for looking out for the safety of animals!
Read the story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/07/10/ottawa-walmart-hot-cars-vehicles-dogs-animals-worker-fired-cheney-parking-lot-customer.html
AtomicKitten
(46,585 posts)bigwillq
(72,790 posts)LeftofObama
(4,243 posts)Thanks for posting this.
Spirochete
(5,264 posts)This is the one Cheney who should NOT be out of a job.
shawn703
(2,702 posts)But couldn't the employer be looking out for the safety of the employee? If that guy was a nutjob in addition to being an animal abuser and didn't like being confronted the way he was in that parking lot, there could have been a more tragic ending to this story. If the employer gave her his seal of approval for the employee to confront random customers about wrongdoing on store property, I could see how the employer could be held liable if something went wrong. A lot of stores have a "no interference, just report" policy even when it comes to shoplifters because they don't want their employees to get hurt when they try to stop them.
Omaha Steve
(99,635 posts)But I would have done the same thing.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)From a management perspective and as a general rule, it might make sense to have a supervisor deal with customer problems. There are probabley safety and liability issues at play.
Having said that, I don't know how walmart operates and the employee may have felt that telling a manager would not have solved the problem. If she had no faith that management would follow through, I can see why she did what she did.
Quantess
(27,630 posts)and was waiting for her shift to start. I suppose she still could have asked a supervisor to handle it, but still, getting fired seems drastic.
Before I saw the video I wondered if maybe she was belligerent, but her appearance on the video makes me seriously doubt that she was at all rude to the customer.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)then it could still be a problem from a PR perspective. It sounds like she wasn't fired because she had the incident with the customer. Rather, she was fired because, after being told not to do something like that again, she told her employer that she would indeed do it again. This is basically admitting that she would disregard explicit directives and/or company policy, which is probably never a good thing to say to management if you want to keep your job.
I'm the last person to defend walmart, I completely agree that firing her was drastic, and I think she did the right thing in confronting the customer. Walmart, as usual, is being a total buttwad about this.