Maroc - dailynews.co.za - News - 18/Feb 11:51

Baker reinstated after unfair dismissal over mixing mistake

A baker who omitted to mix white bread flour with brown flour, resulting in a bakery losing more than 11 000 loaves of bread, will not lose his job after his employer initially fired him.The Johannesburg Labour Court came to the aid of Thabani Khumalo after Pioneer Foods, trading as Aeroton Bakery, wanted to have an earlier CCMA ruling - which found his dismissal to be unfair - overturned. A commissioner at the CCMA earlier found that the dismissal of Khumalo was found to be substantively unfair and ordered the bakery to reinstate him. He was fired after he was found guilty of gross negligence during a disciplinary hearing. The charges against him related to him not manually blending brown bread flour with white bread flour, which resulted in the business incurring losses of at least R39 853.00. This was calculated at its cost of R3.60 for a loaf of bread.He also faced a charge of gross insubordination as he ignored his supervisor’s instruction to manually mix the two flours together. It was said that his actions resulted in the poor quality of the brown bread flour, which compromised the final product during the baking process. After he was fired, Khumalo challenged the termination of his 16-year employment relationship with the company. At the time of his dismissal, he was a production supervisor stationed at the bakery.The brown bread flour problem came to the attention of the acting production manager and this resulted in a management meeting. At the end of the meeting, it was resolved that in order to restore the quality of the brown bread flour, a certain amount of the white bread flour should be added to the brown bread flour. It was decided that the blending should be conducted manually as the automatic mixing would cause a drop in throughput. Thus, all the production supervisors were instructed to get the white bread flour from the old production plant and act accordingly.The primary reason behind the bakery taking disciplinary steps against Khumalo was his failure to carry out the instruction, which resulted in the loss of 11 070 poor-quality loaves. It, however, turned out that Khumalo’s supervisor only told him about four hours after Khumalo had started his shift about the instruction to mix the white and the brown flour manually. By then, the bread was already being baked.Amid the crisis, the supervisor saw it necessary to focus on compiling his reports while the losses were happening in the plant. He later attributed the losses to Khumalo. Based on this, the commission found Khumalo’s dismissal to be unfair. The Labour Court now said that based on the totality of factors placed before the commissioner, it cannot be said that she had committed an error of fact or law that calls for the review of the arbitration award.“The decision made in her award is within the standards of reasonableness. On this note, the application for the review of the arbitration award is bound to fail,” the court said.zelda.venter@inl.co.za