Lolz. Public corporations don't care about your well being. If there is an ROI on any action, it's worth taking and if that means no cookies because it ensure the shareholders get a fraction of a percent return, then no cookies for you.

I'm working hard to leave my current corpo. They're down to the "bring the dry pen back to get a new one" stage of bean counting. That's a sinking ship to disembark from ASAP.

Gotta milk every last cent out of us. Honestly the absurdity and cruelty only make the revolution come that much faster and if they are cruel enough we won't even have any moral hangups about it (for those that would).

Same people that expect YOU to work hard enough to generate millions in revenue while THEY take 99% of it.

Law suit territory. Time for a comfortable retirement.

Seems like a slam dunk case. What a joke of a company. Hope they fire everyone who thought it was smart to fire this guy. Huge waste

Wrongful termination for sure, idk about defamation. I think it'd be hard to argue being accused of stealing a cookie actually hurt your reputation in any meaningful way.

I think Kromm should give them a first hand lesson in the riddle of steel...

Yep. I remember having to temporarily sit at the desk of some department head to address a network problem, whose desk was covered in paperwork involving some poor custodian who was asking for a medically necessary limited period of light duty as a result of a work-related injury, and this director's handwritten notes all over it, with shit like "if she can't do the job she shouldn't be here, let's draw a line under this," etc. It was clear exactly what they were getting at; they ALL knew the law, hence the handwritten notes and vague language. The casual nature of it was revolting.

they are like testing the waters with the 60yo, then they can apply it to other employees.

If I had to guess, I'd say we're way past the "testing" stage and doing this at industrial scale. This just happened to be the kind of egregious implementation of policy that trickles into the news cycle.

For every Kurt Kromm, I'll bet there's a dozen employees fired due parking tickets or misentered vacation or failure to meet some impossible milestone in they're performance plans. More traditional and acceptable routes for firings.

This was just a particularly lazy, sloppy execution

Yeah. If your company is looking that closely into your behavior, they are looking for an excuse instead of a reason.

Or as someone else here said, he was getting too close to retirement or some other kind of seniority/longevity-based benefit that the company didn't want to pay out.

But to even think of using it as an excuse..

In Norway/most of Europe a lawyer would've had a field day with this case.

$1.95 is more than a nickel and a dime... that's a profit center for several people in the supply chain.

I've gone through psych evals in corporate hiring that ask a bunch of bullshit "would you steal a penny to feed a starving orphan" questions, intended to weed out anyone with an ounce of conscience.

They mostly just teach you to lie to your boss

Imagine having cookies in the break room that you have to pay $2 for... wtf.

Uhhh.... It didn't help him as much as it should have, but my understanding from watching a video about this yesterday is that he already got paid back for the time after he was fired because of the union. So, it did help him some.

UAW is an awful organization that's basically a "good old boy"'s club. Most reps are just a revolving door of former execs from the Big 3 anyway who work with their buddies to keep workers at bay.

Getting off topic but I'm all for increasing Union membership in this country, but think we also need to discuss the rot that's in the ones that do exist.

There always used to be a joke in the UK about Fords being cheap on the second-hand market. You could get parts easily, so they were cheap to maintain, as well. But you'd see the ads saying 50k miles, new clutch, new exhaust, new CVs, bearings, etc. because they fell apart all the time. This was back when Japanese cars were proving to the world how reliable cars could be. Nobody I knew wanted a Ford, though some people got them if they were really cheap.

Companies love firing people rather than letting them retire. Hell even the government loves to do it. It happened to my dad, he got forced into early retirement after 30 years of government service. The union really failed him.