Employee who left work early for hospital didn’t falsify time sheets on purpose: Arbitrator

Worker fell ill and left work without punching out; company didn't alert worker to discrepancy

An Ontario company did not have cause to fire a worker who signed and submitted a false time sheet, an arbitrator has ruled.

The worker was employed as a dry sand assembler for Haley Industries, a manufacturer of magnesium and aluminum sand castings for the aerospace industry located in Haley, Ont. She had been with the company for four years when she reported for her shift on Feb. 27, 2008. She swiped an ID card in a reader which registered her start time, which the company required.

As she worked, she kept track of different tasks on a time sheet, another standard practice. About midway through the shift, she began experiencing severe abdominal pain. She tried to continue working, but the pain became too great and she told her supervisor she was going to the hospital. However, when she left she didn’t swipe her card in the reader to “clock out.” She returned to work the next day with a note from the hospital. After she left work, her supervisor recovered her time sheet and noticed she had marked eight hours when she had only worked four before she left for the hospital. She took the card to management, who agreed to give her time to correct the time sheet. However, the worker wasn’t told what was going on.

An office clerk who noticed the worker hadn’t swiped out on Feb. 27 manually entered her normal shift end time in the records, which was normal procedure when a card wasn’t swiped. As a result, the worker’s next paycheque included four hours of payment to which she wasn’t entitled. The worker didn’t notice because her pay had been uneven recently due to absences.

On March 10, 2008, Haley Industries fired the worker for submitting a false time card and for not reporting the overpayment, which it considered fraud and theft from the company.

The arbitrator agreed deliberate falsification of a time sheet to get paid for work not done was a serious offence that “calls for substantial discipline.” However, he found the worker did not deliberately do it. She did enter some extra time on her sheet in anticipation of working that time, but once the abdominal pain started she was concentrating on going to the hospital and nothing else.

The arbitrator found it was unreasonable for Haley Industries to have expected her to take time to fix the sheet and swipe out, especially since it knew the reason for her missed hours and it didn’t bother to bring the discrepancy to her attention.

“I have no doubt the (worker) would have corrected the time sheet at once, and the company would not have made the overpayment it did,” if it told her, the arbitrator said. The company was ordered to reinstate the worker with all lost wages and benefits restored. See Haley Industries Ltd. v. U.S.W., 2008 CarswellNat 3433 (Can. Arb. Bd.).

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