Man Fired Over Cannabis Gets Re-hired with Bonus

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]G[/dropcap]etting fired from a job for testing positive for cannabis is a prominent issue in 2018, with so many companies, states and even countries adopting more lenient cannabis policies. Recently, a Canadian transportation worker who lost his job due to cannabis consumption got it back, and then some.

According to TB News Watch, an arbitrator ordered the reinstatement of a worker at Bombardier Transportation, a company in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. The ruling stated that the company did not have just cause to fire the employee. He will not only be reinstated with no loss of seniority, but he will be compensated for the lost time incurred while he wasn’t working.

The supervisor who fired the anonymous co-worker claimed that he saw the employee and a friend standing in a spot where he said cannabis consumption was common and a lot of paraphernalia had been found. Allegedly smoke was coming from the mouth of the worker, and the supervisor smelled cannabis. However, when the employee and the location were searched, nothing was discovered, so there was no real evidence, besides a smell and what looked like smoke, according to one man, to cause the worker to lose his job.

“He was not seen smoking, exhaling or disposing of drugs or paraphernalia,” the arbitrator ruled. “The company has not demonstrated that it is more probable that the griever smoked marijuana on its property on October 5 than that he did not.”

This isn’t the first time that an employee has been let off the hook for allegedly smoking cannabis. According to The Register-Guard, an Oregon man got his job back in 2016. The man was a cancer survivor, and it was determined that there was not enough evidence t that he was actually smoking on the job to constitute a firing.

This trend in workplace leniency represents a significant shift in how cannabis consumers are treated, and will hopefully lead to fairer policies in the future.