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.
It’s 100% some new eager to the position/role security kid who hasn’t made any progress so they chose to pick on the tiniest infringement to be able to get a nickel raise at the end of year.
It wasn’t about the cookie
it was about his pay, benefits, retirements.
But to even think of using it as an excuse…
In Norway/most of Europe a lawyer would’ve had a field day with this case.
they are hoping the employee wont lawyer or if they do it would be expensive for them.
Johnny Cash enters the chat…
Well, it’s a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56, '57, '58, '59 automobile
It’s a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67, '68, '69, '70 automobile
“Well the headlights, they were quite a sight, with two on the left and one on the right…”
What the fuck
Even if he did steal this cookie, imagine valueing your employee’s so little.
Imagine having cookies in the break room that you have to pay $2 for… wtf.
its ford.
I’ve gone through psych evals in corporate hiring that ask a bunch of bullshit “would you steal a penny to feed a starving orphan” questions, intended to weed out anyone with an ounce of conscience.
They mostly just teach you to lie to your boss
Jesus Christ. Should’ve followed it up with the question, “why is the company purposely withholding a penny when it could be used to feed a starving orphan?”
It’s like with overly strict parents; the only thing they are teaching their kids is how to lie and sneak around
they want brownosers, in case the higher ups get caught with something unethical, they want lies to protect them.
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.
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.
they are like testing the waters with the 60yo, then they can apply it to other employees.
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
60-year-old
That’s why. I guess Ford won’t have to pay him some retirement package.
they did it to soon, most of them try to get rid of the employee months before they become 65
There are 35-year-olds that have worked for Ford longer.
100% this is ‘we want to fire this guy because he made somebody one or two or three levels above him on the totem pole look really foolish’.
Its the same bullshit as ‘oh you don’t get your security deposit back because … we decided you scratched something, somewhere’.
I miss when you only didn’t get the security deposit back
Yeah. If your company is looking that closely into your behavior, they are looking for an excuse instead of a reason.
Or as someone else here said, he was getting too close to retirement or some other kind of seniority/longevity-based benefit that the company didn’t want to pay out.
What are they on the honor system in their break room?
That and surveillance cameras, apparently.
Should sue for defamation and damages
I think Kromm should give them a first hand lesson in the riddle of steel…
Kromm is the best God, because he is the worst God.
Other Gods offer power, strength, abilities, riches…
Kromm?
Kromm offers nothing.
Yet if you please Kromm… you will already have all that you need.
For modern cars, it’s the riddle of aluminum
goddamnit that got a snort out of me, hah!
Howez man if you’re going to use an Arnie meme in this context then use this:
Wrongful termination for sure, idk about defamation. I think it’d be hard to argue being accused of stealing a cookie actually hurt your reputation in any meaningful way.
If the employee isn’t ready to retire, being fired for theft of company property is something that will absolutely affect their reputation.
Law suit territory. Time for a comfortable retirement.
Seems like a slam dunk case. What a joke of a company. Hope they fire everyone who thought it was smart to fire this guy. Huge waste
Yeah the fire people committee will get right on firing themselves
Should buy a Komatsu D355A and a mig welder.
Should accept the job offer elsewhere and sue the fuck out of Ford for wrongful termination. It’s the only thing they understand.
lol for what?
The only damages are one week’s pay.
Who puts cookies in the break room and expects you to pay for it.
It’s cookies.
They’re cheap.
Treat your workers.
Treat your colleagues.
My current company contracts someone to keep a few fridges and shelves in the break room stocked with higher grade convenience-store style food. The prices are pretty cheap, so I suspect they actually lose money on the deal. If I grabbed some food and just walked away with it, that would technically be stealing. I doubt they would confront me about something that small, though. Ford is obviously wrong to fire someone over a cookie.
It always seemed like a no-brainer to me to provide subsidized food for expensive salary workers who may be willing to work unpaid overtime if they don’t have to leave to get dinner, at least from a logic self-serving point of view.
Lolz. Public corporations don’t care about your well being. If there is an ROI on any action, it’s worth taking and if that means no cookies because it ensure the shareholders get a fraction of a percent return, then no cookies for you.
I’m working hard to leave my current corpo. They’re down to the “bring the dry pen back to get a new one” stage of bean counting. That’s a sinking ship to disembark from ASAP.
If there is a short term easilly measured ROI on any action, it’s worth taking and if that means no cookies because it ensure the shareholders get a fraction of a percent return, then no cookies for you.
FIFY.
Their actions are not even competent by their own worldview - this kind of corporate management invariably sacrifice long term hard to measure yet large positive outcomes for the company (such as the gains from keeping highly trained personnel who stuck around because of goodwill towards the company rather than having the constant hiring and training costs as well as lower productivity from high turnaround) for miniscule but easy to measure immediate gains (like saving the equivalent of 1% of a single average worker’s salary by not providing free cookies).
There really is no point in penny pinching if its going to increase employee turnaround in a domain were experience makes a significant difference.
Loss of experience isn’t a trackable metric, you can’t put it in a spreadsheet, so it doesn’t exist to the company.
The cost of hiring and training a new employee is something a company of that size should know, and it’s definitely more than the cost of a $2 cookie.
Exactly.
If large company needs to count bullshit like that, they are not in a healthy position.
Craziest shit is that has to cost way more than just buying an extra box of fucking pens
Last two companies I worked for treat their workers to a lot of goodies, like food, after work parties, stuff like that. Not everyone is that stingy. But of course, they only care in order to make workers happy to make more money for the company.
In the end, it’s all about the moolah.
It’s fine for companies to be motivated by money, what matters is that they make the right decisions. Regulations help with that, but this very post is a clear example of how a money-motivated company can instead try to squeeze their employees for more money instead of spending money on them to hopefully increase productivity.
thats pretty much with tech, all these conferences they go to are AI, and they get all these goodie bags, and free “ice cream”, so they dont end up rebelling or “kicking and screaming out the door” when they are laid off.
Kinda curious about the quotes around “ice cream” tbh
Same people that expect YOU to work hard enough to generate millions in revenue while THEY take 99% of it.
Scum.
Gotta milk every last cent out of us. Honestly the absurdity and cruelty only make the revolution come that much faster and if they are cruel enough we won’t even have any moral hangups about it (for those that would).
If it ain’t in a vending machine, it should be free.
I have definitely seen vending machines at various office over the years.
Ford is really kicking ass lately. In a bad way
thier own ass, so thats good.
when has ford ever been the good guy
Exactly. Ford is the company that took “fines for illegal actions as a normal cost of doing business” to the next level. There are others, but they’re pretty much at the top of the list, IMO.
I didn’t say they were… but the company has been successful in the past
The mental image i got is that they are kicking their own ass using a broken leg. Pretty accurate if you ask me - it hurts doubly every time you do it.
But the executives can get away with making decisions that kill innocent people to save a few bucks.
Making short-sighted decisions that fails, lays off 8,000 employees, gets a govt bail out, flies home on the corporate jets, uses the bailout money to give a huge bonus and buy a new corporate jet
like a parasite, they jump to another company before they the flak for ruining the previous company,.
But the executives can get away with stealing an employee’s pension that he actually earned.
They get away with both, and plenty more
Union didn’t help him at all
union usually dont help when a person gets fired for stealing wether thats true or not.
Uhhh… It didn’t help him as much as it should have, but my understanding from watching a video about this yesterday is that he already got paid back for the time after he was fired because of the union. So, it did help him some.
UAW is an awful organization that’s basically a “good old boy”'s club. Most reps are just a revolving door of former execs from the Big 3 anyway who work with their buddies to keep workers at bay.
Getting off topic but I’m all for increasing Union membership in this country, but think we also need to discuss the rot that’s in the ones that do exist.
Reading the best democracy money can Buy was a really good read
What would they help him with though? He had proven he has paid and they reversed course on the firing.
Thats some fantastic labor law right there
