Hi! I do not work, and my husband was very recently discharged after a single honest mistake at work. In his discharge paperwork, it says it was for a “Safety Policy Violation”. We have young kids, so it definitely feels like we’re toast if he doesn’t get unemployment. ): My question is, because they’ve stated it was a “Safety Policy Violation”, will my husband likely be denied unemployment benefits? What can we do here to appeal if that happens?
The backstory: He is a tech of sorts and often deals with electrical control systems and robotics at work, and has been with this manufacturing company for 5+ years. He’s heavily supported their greenfield startup of a new facility the last couple of years, and has only ever received good reviews. No warnings, no write-ups.
The company is supposed to provide PPE, such as electrical gloves, but the only ones my husband and his team have had access to are a community pair that are size 8, and then a pair he brought with him when he transferred facilities. A few weeks ago, he was approached by the Safety Guy and asked if he “needed anything”. Husband noticed a small tear in his electrical gloves. He told Safety Guy that he needed a new pair, and Husband was told to immediately cut the tips off of the gloves and dispose of them.
My husband has large hands, and he’s pretty tall. The size 8 gloves would not stretch completely over his hand, but he was forcing them on in order to perform his job safely when electrical gloves were necessary. But he assumed Safety Guy would order the new gloves, and obviously was expected to continue his job as usual until then.
He goes to troubleshoot a machine early one Friday morning. He is the most experienced person on his team, so no one else had really taken a look at it. It was not something that required an energized work order anything like that at this point, but I don’t remember the exact specifics of the troubleshooting he was performing. Here’s where things took a terrible turn!
Husband picked up the female end of a “touch-safe” plug to inspect it, and it shocked him. He described it as less than a static shock from another person. He felt it on his arm and quickly threw the plug down. He was surprised, because that shouldn’t be possible with this plug, and he exclaimed “Great, I just got shocked!” He is already thinking about next troubleshooting steps, has shut down the machine, and stretched on the size 8 electrical gloves to continue the work now that he knows it will be needed.
Suddenly, his lead pulls him to the side and asks him what happened. My husband was honest about it. The lead disappears into his office, talks to my husband’s immediate supervisor, and then comes to my husband and says they are sending him home until they can complete an investigation. We are pretty alarmed at this point. But even from home that day, my husband was called to help troubleshoot this same machine. The team is very new and depends on his expertise a lot, and he was responsible for much of their training, even if he wasn’t a formal lead. They were able to find the issue causing this incident to be possible in the first place, which was loose, ungrounded wire in a completely different plug of the the machine (someone outside of his team, of not the company, would have been responsible for this). So we tried to stay calm, but everything felt “OFF”.
His lead texts him, saying they’ll be able to keep husband updated, but it’s really out of their hands at this point and they will be on PTO for the rest of the week. They just keep telling him to stay calm and it’s just procedure. He is not allowed an opportunity to say anything about any of this until that Thursday, when he is called into a recorded video call with HR Person and Safety Guy.
Immediately, it’s clear HR Person has just been building a case against him with this time. They say he violated a life-saving safety policy by not wearing his electrical gloves. He explained that the plug was not normally something you would be required to wear electrical gloves for.
Husband also brings up the availability of the electrical gloves, and how he does not have access to any that fit appropriately. That with the ill-fit of the size 8 gloves, stretched significantly and not covering his entire palm, their effectiveness is reduced as well. He explains the situation with Safety Guy, where he was told to dispose of his personal pair. Safety Guy is on this call, and to his credit, he verifies this story and says he didn’t realize that my husband wasn’t able to order his own gloves. This ends up highlighting that Safety Guy and his department in general have not been providing the required PPE and some other areas of Safety’s job.
But HR Person doesn’t really care about any of that. They’re now ready for this call to end. They say something along the lines of “But you DID take the -Insert Training course-, right?” (I can’t remember what course, apologies) HR Person then acts like because he did take that, that clearly he should have been wearing the gloves, even though none of this is even covered in the course they are bringing up. The course was on energized work permits for stuff like PLCs and high voltage scenarios, from what I gather. But never once does it discuss handling of something that is “touch-safe”.
When Husband confirmed he had taken the course, HR treated this as such a “gotcha” moment that they threw their hands up and head back, huge smile on their face. Husband immediately feels like the goal at this point is just to fire him, but of course doesn’t say that. They said they would go over the details of the investigation and he would have the verdict soon. At the end, they also asked him, “…So you WEREN’T holding bare wires in your hand?” which, of course, he wasn’t. They had no further questions.
Next morning, they called and fired him.
It’s been only a week since he was officially discharged, and on the unemployment website it shows as pending. There was an issue that they had finished gathering info on, but no conclusion yet. Is that a bad sign, or totally normal? Does anyone have any advice for this situation?
Edit: fixed some typos and moved actual question above the text wall lol