Plester v. PolyOne Canada Inc. Update: Serious Safety Violation Is Still Not Cause For Termination

In a previous post, we discussed a decision which held that, PolyOne Canada Inc. (PolyOne), did not have just cause for terminating a senior employee who committed a safety violation and failed to report it, despite finding that the incident was very serious and could have resulted in harm to the employee. The Court of Appeal upheld this decision, although it disagreed, in part, with the basis for the lower court’s decision.

The safety violation, which you may recall from our previous post, was that a supervisor, John Plester, failed to lock-out a machine before attempting to fix it and then failed to report the violation, both of which were in breach of the employer’s safety policies. Even worse, Mr. Plester allegedly tried to convince his subordinates not to report the incident to his superiors.