Alex Trelinski
A BASQUE Country court says a worker was rightly sacked for putting bleach in her water bottle to teach colleagues ‘a lesson’ as they kept drinking from it.
The sports centre cleaner at San Sebastian said her ‘patience had run out’ after workers had pilfered from her marked bottle on ‘several occasions’.
The woman lost a case against her dismissal at a lower court and the Basque Country High Court threw out her appeal.
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It said the ‘sanction was proportionate to the offence committed by the worker”.
The former employee had cleaned at the centre since 2014 and staff had a communal fridge where they could leave food and drink.
The employee used to leave her bottle of water with her name on it but other workers drank from it, and once she found it thrown into the trash can.
In November 2023, she set a trap by leaving her named half-litre bottle with some bleach in the fridge.
Two days later, a colleague drank from it and when he realised what he was consuming, he spat it out.
He went to a hospital emergency room for a check up but no damage was done.
The woman admitted to er bosses that she had made the concoction.
She was fired a few days later on the grounds that her behaviour amounted to ‘fraud and disloyalty that the management entrusted to her’, as well as in her dealings with co-workers, and ‘a transgression of contractual good faith’.
The High Court judgment is not final and can be appealed at the Basque Country Supreme Court’s Labour Chamber.
