Maybe They Should’ve Let Him Drop The Box On His Head

We recently had a new employee assigned to the area I manage. I walked him through the training. He was somewhat unfocused, often needing an instruction or demonstration to be repeated two or three times before he got it, but once he paid attention, he picked up the various tasks quickly enough, and he completed them well. After a few days of training, he seemed set to work on his own, so I left him to it.

Later that day, I was walking through the factory floor and turned down an aisle in time to see [New Employee] standing on his tiptoes, slowly inching a box filled with very heavy parts off of one of the shelves. This was very much not how I had shown him how to pull boxes down, and even as I started forward, I saw the box start to tip.

I managed to reach him in time to shove him out of the way so that the box slammed into my shoulder rather than smashing straight into his head. I got knocked to my knee, shouting as the box almost dislocated my shoulder, and the box ended up wedged between me and the shelf. I managed to twist enough to get it off my shoulder and down onto the floor. By the time I turned back, [New Employee] was literally running off, apparently crying as he went.

A couple of others ran over, and I assigned them to check out the box for broken parts while I struggled to my feet to head to the on-site safety station. I got my shoulder checked out, and they ended up putting a brace on it.

That is when someone from Human Resources showed up. Apparently, [New Employee] had run straight there to scream about me “attacking” him.

I was pissed, and I ended up tearing into both [New Employee] and the HR representative, who had tried to say that they were going to suspend me for “unacceptable behavior”. I laid out what I’d seen and how we had possibly been seconds away from HR having to fill out details on how an employee had died on-site from dropping a box of heavy metal on his own head.

The fallout from all of this was… [New Employee] walked away with no issue, and I was reassigned to undergo sensitivity training because [New Employee] claimed a learning disability and said I hadn’t trained him properly.

So, I did the course, and I walked [New Employee] through all of the training again, this time dragging along someone from HR to verify and sign off on everything because my word was no longer good enough. Everything was signed off after a week of training, but this time, rather than having [New Employee] work on his own, I assigned him a partner to work with.

Over the course of the next two weeks, [New Employee] ended up with almost a dozen safety complaints against him. On two separate occasions, he tried to pull the same “go on tiptoe and slide a box off the shelf” stunt. He extended a box cutter fully and then waved it around like a sword, almost cutting his partner. He tried to climb into one of the forklifts and drive it, despite having zero training on operating it.

And with every complaint, HR told me that I couldn’t do anything — I couldn’t discipline him in any way — and they threatened me with another sensitivity course for “singling [New Employee] out”.

So, I went over their heads to the local safety inspectors. Within a day of doing that, I had a meeting with HR, a safety rep, and some of the C-suite (executives) for our company. I laid out all of the issues, provided the signed-by-HR training documents, and then laid out my ultimatum: either [New Employee] would be fired, or he would be assigned to the HR office (or somewhere else in the company). I flat-out refused to have him out on the factory floor.

HR made an anemic attempt to bring up “non-discrimination”, and I told them that the only way I’d be discriminating against anyone is if I kept him on; if literally anyone else had the safety record [New Employee] had, they would have been fired straight away.

From what I heard, he was moved to HR for all of three days, and then he was let go for some “undisclosed incidents”.