A man who got fired after drinking on the job, to the point he became unconscious, has been awarded roughly $40,000 for being “discriminatorily sacked.”
Independent.ie reports the employee worked as a manager of the Connolly’s Supervalu grocery store in a small town in Ireland. That is, he was employed there until he decided to chug vodka while on the clock. He eventually went “comatose” on company grounds, and his employers decided to give him the boot.
Turns out the employee, named Eamon Murphy, had done the same thing the previous year and promised to never do it again. He even went through a recovery program, and seemed to be walking the straight and narrow until his employers left him in charge of the supermarket for one weekend so they could attend their daughter’s wedding.
He brought a “considerable volume of alcohol” to work and drank “to such an extent that he had become completely unconscious and seriously alarmed his immediate colleagues to his wellbeing,” his former employers argued.
Well, the employee filed a complaint with the Workplace Relations Commission, which ruled he was “discriminatorily sacked” for being an alcoholic.
Barrister Rosemary Mallon ruled, “In plain English, the complainant was dismissed simply because he was an alcoholic – this was grossly discriminatory.”
He was then awarded about $39,000, per law.