(the "Company")

AND

(the "Union")

SOLE ARBITRATOR: J. F. W. Weatherill

A hearing in this matter was held at Montreal on February 23, 1984.

The Dispute and Joint Statement of Fact and Issue in this matter are as follows:

The grievor was hired by the company as a Carman Helper in December, 1974, being promoted to Carman in February, 1977. He was discharged on May 18, 1983, for the reasons set out in the Joint Statement. The issue is whether or not the grievor was discharged for just cause.

There is no substantial dispute as to the facts. There would appear to have been a number of occasions on which the grievor’s conduct was improper, but the charges against him are of two sorts. One is that on April 13, 1983, and again on April 14, the grievor had another employee punch out his time card for him, while the grievor left work early, without authorization. The grievor, whose shift was from 1530 to 2330 hours, left work on each occasion at about 1900. He had previously arranged with another employee that the latter would punch out his time card for him, and the other employee did so, at 2330. This was admitted by the grievor, who acknowledged that he had no authorization to leave. He had, then attempted to defraud the company of two hours’ worth of pay, on two occasions.

Clearly what the grievor did was wrong, and he of course knew it to be so. He offered no explanation. There can be no doubt that the grievor was subject to severe discipline for this serious of fence. It is possible that given the grievor’s length of service and his apparently clear record (the company did not rely on any disciplinary record, although it appears that the grievor had been assessed ten demerits for poor timekeeping), some penalty less than discharge may have been appropriate, but it is not necessary to decide that point, given the other facts of this case.

The second sort of charges against the grievor relate either to the outright theft of company property, or to the purchase of stolen goods, knowing them to have been the property of the employer. The grievor was, as his own statement makes clear, guilty of both of these offences. On April 15, 1983, on a search of the grievor’s home made pursuant to a search warrant, a very substantial quantity of a wide variety of goods belonging to the company was found. The grievor acknowledged that he had simply taken some of these goods, accumulating them in a closet at work over a period of time. Others the grievor said that he had purchased from a former employee of the company. He knew that these were goods of a sort which the company did not sell, and it is clear that he must have known they had been stolen from the company.

From the material before me it is clear that for some time the grievor had been stealing the company’s property, and that he had been buying property known to have been stolen from the company. His only excuse was that he wanted these items for his own use. This is a case of deliberate theft over a prolonged period of time.

There can be no doubt that the company was justified in discharging the employee, and I so find.

In the circumstances, there was just cause for the company’s action. The grievance is therefore dismissed.

DATED AT TORONTO, this 7th day of March, 1984.

Arbitrator