A Ford employee says he lost his job after being accused of stealing a $1.95 cookie, only for the company to later realize he’d actually paid for it.
60-year-old Kurt Kromm had worked at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant for 11 years, but told Shifting Gears he was fired after the company believed security footage showed him taking a cookie from the break room without paying.
its not an accident, they often use this excuse to get rid of legacy employees in other industries so they dont have to pay them more down the line, like when they retire or they are set to get more in investments in thier retirements, or thier salary is too high or thier insurance is costing them too much, they just got caught with thier hand in the cookie jar.
they are like testing the waters with the 60yo, then they can apply it to other employees. especially him being 60, likely will retire in 5ish years, ford likely knew that and trying to get rid of him now, but someone in managment made a mistake, and miscalculated when they should get rid of him.
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
It’s worse without unions, but setting expectations beyond capacity and pointing a camera at points of failure is key to a good turnover rate.
If you’re looking at 300-400% turnover then you don’t really end up with that sort of issue in the first place.