Apology at hearing too late after worker called employer’s investigation ‘juvenile’: arbitrator
A British Columbia employer had just cause to fire a worker who violated a safety policy and tried to minimize the risk involved, according to an arbitrator.
West Fraser Mills (WFM) is a lumber company that operates a lumber mill in 100 Mile House, BC. It hired the worker in 2005, and he eventually took on the position of oiler at the mill.
WFM had a lock-out procedure program and policy that were mandatory for employees performing work on energized equipment, including conveyor belts.
On May 13, 2024, the worker was working in the oiler room in the mill’s basement. There were several oil barrels stacked on racks in front of a slow-moving conveyor belt. An oil catchment tray with a drainage pipe lay under the racked oil barrels, but it had been blocked for months.
No lock-out of equipment
At the start of his shift, the worker was frustrated because the person on the previous shift had left him with empty barrels. However, the empty barrels gave him an opportunity to remove one and try to clear the blockage in the drainage pipe, which appeared to be a plastic bottle cap.
The worker tried poking at the blockage with a coat hanger, but he was unable to reach it. His frustration grew and he knew he could get at it from the other end of the drainage pipe by moving into the area where the moving conveyor belt was.
The worker could have called a foreman upstairs - the lock-out policy required him to cut power to the conveyor belt before entering the area - which would have taken about 10 minutes, but he didn’t think it would be unsafe to quickly climb into the area and remove the pipe blockage. He decided the “shortcut” was low risk and stepped into the area where the empty barrel had been, knelt with his legs on either side of the moving conveyor belts, and poked the bottle cap loose from the other end of the drainage pipe.
While the worker was doing this, WFM’s maintenance planner walked by and saw what he was doing. The worker said something like he shouldn’t have seen what was happening and asked him not to report it, but the maintenance planner decided to report it to his supervisor.
Safety violation
The supervisor went with the two of them to the scene and the worker demonstrated what he had been doing. He questioned what “all this is necessary” and said the process was “so juvenile.” They returned to the supervisor’s office with a union representative and the worker was agitated, saying it had only been a few seconds and nobody would have known if the maintenance supervisor hadn’t come by. He also suggested that other aspects of his job were more dangerous than what he had just done and did “this kind of thing all the time.”
At a second meeting on May 17, the worker was calmer and said he should have handled that day better. He said he had been “choked” because he knew he had committed a lock-out violation and had gotten caught, but emphasized that he had only been over the conveyor belt for 10 seconds. When asked if he did similar things, he reiterated that some of the procedures “are a joke” and “I do a lot of grey things.” He also said safety sometimes got “swept under the rug.”
The worker didn’t apologize, as he thought he wouldn’t be fired for what he did. He had no discipline on his record outside of the period of the collective agreement’s sunset clause, and no prior discipline for safety infractions.
On May 28, WFM terminated the worker’s employment for cause. The union grieved, conceding that discipline was warranted but arguing that termination was excessive for an employee with 19 years of service and no safety-related discipline. The union maintained that the worker was honest and forthright about his actions and it was a careless, spur-of-the-moment lapse in judgment.
Termination of employment
The arbitrator noted that the central issue as whether termination was an excessive response, pointing out that violation of safety rules constitutes a serious workplace offence and lock-out procedures are among the most important safety features in workplaces such as lumber mills.
The arbitrator agreed with WFM that the worker’s breach of the lock-out policy was a serious workplace offence and the worker made a deliberate choice to breach the policy when he assessed the danger as minimal and consciously took a shortcut to get at the blocked drainage pipe without shutting down the conveyor belt. Although the worker was frustrated to start his shift, it was part of normal things that could happen at the mill and something the worker would likely face again if reinstated, the arbitrator said.
The arbitrator also found that the worker’s conduct following the incident raised concerns over whether he would work safely if reinstated. The worker’s immediate reaction was to treat the safety violation as trivial and express frustration at being caught, rather than accepting responsibility. Essentially, the worker’s behaviour at the two meetings showed an attempt to downplay his misconduct and a belief that WFM was overreacting, said the arbitrator.
The worker apologized at the hearing, but this didn’t alleviate concerns about his ability to work safely because it was “an after-the-fact attempt to save his job, rather than a genuine expression of remorse and contrition,” the arbitrator said.
Despite the fact that the worker had a lengthy tenure with WFM and no prior discipline, the arbitrator determined that termination was an appropriate response in the circumstances. The grievance was dismissed. See West Fraser Mills (100 Mile House Operation) v. United Steelworkers, Local 1-2017, 2025 CanLII 57034.
