We had a driver fired today because his car rolled away on him and hit something. We were told that a roll away is automatic termination written in the contract. Anybody here have any experience or heard of anything with this type of situation? It sounds like the hearing will be a couple weeks from now so hopefully everything works out for him. The guys been with the company for a long time and as far as I know has an excellent record otherwise. Seems to me like a chicken***t reason to fire a guy, but nothing UPS does surprises me much.
In the Central Region Supplemental Agreement section of the National Master United Parcel Service Agreement, it states, under Article 17:
"...be given a local level hearing except for the following offenses.
(g) an avoidable runaway accident.
I'm sure other regions have the same or similar lanquage in their supplements so it looks like a runaway is always a termination. Never mind the "avoidable" because it seems like everything is now deemed "avoidable" nowadays.
However, as has been posted and threaded here in BC and what seems to be consensus is that every center, hub, panel, JAC meeting is different. In other words, it depends on who is sitting on the panel (both sides), who YOU are, what kind of performance you have turned in to date, what kind of management team you have, etc.
You can contact people from 100 different hubs and get 100 different examples of some that were permenantly terminated and some that were "temporarily" terminated, some that were merely suspended, for a day, for a week, month, whatever.
It's not a sure thing. You friend could get his job back, he could not. Just hope that he does, if that's what he wants.