A woman from Ontario has been awarded over C$100,000 (£57,460) in damages after being unfairly dismissed from her job at McDonald’s.
Grandmother of three, Esther Brake, 67, was given an ultimatum – to be demoted or fired after being sent to manage an underperforming franchise in 2012.
Brake, who had been working at McDonald’s franchises since 1986, refused the demotion and was subsequently fired – without notice or payment.
She then sued for wrongful dismissal and won the initial round, BBC News reports. In 2016 Blake was awarded $105,000, plus costs, but the franchise owners appealed.
This week, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the original decision.
Unwilling to back down, Brake said: “I think they thought I would give up months and years ago but I’m not that kind of person.”
In 2012, she was assigned to manage a struggling McDonald’s franchise in an Ottawa suburb. She was told that to succeed she would have to “turn that place around”. Brake started to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, without claiming overtime.
Despite her efforts, in April, she received a poor review and was placed on probation. Her employers told her she had 90 days to improve under McDonald’s progressive discipline program.
The appellant court ruling noted that the original trial judge found that “the thresholds that Ms Brake was ordered to meet were arbitrary and unfair”. The trial judge found that while Brake had “run into some difficulty” with her work by late 2011, she had a history of being a valuable employee.
Her lawyer Miriam Vale Peters, said: “They wanted to make an example out of Esther Brake. She made an example out of them.”
The lawyer representing McDonald’s did not respond for a request to comment.
Brake’s case shows that her employer was happy to take, what they perceived as, the ‘easy’ way out – disciplining or sacking an employee that is deemed to be underperforming, rather than finding the root cause.
However, Marc Bishop, Managing Director of PlusHR, believes it is “important to get to the root cause of underperformance, rather than simply writing the employee off and dismissing staff as soon as they fail to deliver,” – especially an employee with a track record similar to Brake. “Their underperformance might well be a result of apathy but, equally, there could be issues holding them back that could be easily resolved,” he adds.
Writing in BusinessZone, Bishop explained that employers must ask themselves ten questions before firing an underperforming employee – click the story below to find out more…
Source:HRGrapevine
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