A very impressive senior professional confided one day: “I am defined by the work I do.”
And I began to think about that as largely true for those of us in the workforce. Most of our waking hours are spent getting ready for work, going to work, working, and going home from work.
If you happen to enjoy the work you do, that makes for a fulfilling life. If you don’t, it is often unproductive and stressful.
In my teens, when I got my first job, a very wise mentor told me that the words “be happy at your work” did not mean "Choose a job that makes you happy." It meant, no matter what you end up doing to earn a living, find some way to make yourself happy doing it.
I never forgot the shock of that.
School, I soon realised, is where you or your parents, or the government will pay someone else to motivate you to learn, to make you useful to the world. Work is where you get paid to make yourself useful, motivated and so productive.
I thought about that for a long time until I realised that motivation is not what someone else can do to you. It is something only you can do to yourself. That is when you start to grow up.
In industrial relations, it is why the subject of dismissal or termination of a job you hold is so important. For many people, like severance or even retirement, it is a kind of death, part of how we define ourselves, with all kinds of emotional and economic consequences.
Dismissal and what it means under the law, when it is justified, when it is regarded as “harsh, oppressive, unreasonable and unjust,” and when it is regarded as “wrongful” is something anyone going into paid employment as employer or employee should understand the mechanics of. Because even when someone is dismissed when caught stealing from his employer, the Industrial Court can still order that he get his job back if it is not done properly.
Let us start with a judgment that came out in 2013 for misconduct. Two workers, a driver and a loader, were dismissed for gross misconduct. Please note that they were not dismissed for theft…that is a criminal charge. They were dismissed for misconduct. There is a reason for that. In this case it was for defrauding their employer, a paint manufacturer, by stealing paint.
There were several lessons that need to be learned from this case. The first is that the power of a judgment of the court must be taken into consideration. By section 18 (1) (a) in the Industrial Relations Act, a decision of the court in any matter, and I quote: “shall not be challenged, appealed against, quashed or called in question in any court on any account whatever.”
[caption id="attachment_955527" align="alignnone" width="768"] In this photo taken in April 2021, a worker from the Caribbean Dockyard holds a sign during a protest at the company's Chaguaramas headquarters. Photo by Shane Superville[/caption]
Strong words, but it is what it is.
The only exemption would be, of course, if there were some illegality in the presentation
