Tatiana Drebot, Rahmi Putri Atria, Fabian Suhidin Putra, Anak Agung Putri Budiartini, Jack

Slaysman

Dr. Paul Clark

LER 100

5 November 2021
Activity #5- Arbitration Case

1. No, she was not discharged for just cause.

2. In the argument that Kuller was discharged for just cause, we believe the primary

reason for this view is because she changed Terri James name on the final check to her

own name so that she could get the lump sum service charge of $19.64. James was the

primary server to these customers and served them dinner and two rounds of drinks. She

also opened the check and should be entitled to the 17.5% serving charge. Kuller

disregarded all of James' prior effort to serve the customers and decided to take the

money for herself even though her total service charge was only $9.27 at the end of the

night. She should be discharged because she engaged in theft by stealing the funds from

her coworker, and theft is not to be tolerated. She also admitted to stealing from James so

there should be no dispute as to if she engaged in theft or not.

In the argument that Kuller was NOT discharged for just cause, we believe

the primary reason for this view is because there was no previous written policy by the

employer stating that Kuller’s prior actions of changing her name on a customer’s check

was seen as “wrong”. If there is no permanent documentation to punish this action, then

should this action be seen as wrong if there is no policy for the employees to follow in the

first place? Kuller’s union questioned the existence of this rule, and pointed out that it
 was not consistently enforced if this said rule even existed. Other employees have also

been shown to do the same thing that Kuller did, though they never faced any

consequences or discharge. Kuller also publicly told her assistant manager and other

coworkers that she switched the original check to her name. If what Kuller did was such a

punishable action to the company, why did the assistant manager not take any immediate

action to correct the situation? As someone with authority, the assistant manager should

have conducted an investigation against Kuller the moment they found out what she did.

Instead, Kuller only faced a consequence when another coworker told James, who had to

take the action into her own hands to get her money back. Also, we feel that some

negligence should be put onto James herself. She knew she had an active table of

customers, yet still chose to leave her work and cleanup of the customers to another

server (Kuller). It is not as if her shift was about to end or that she was at threat of going

into overtime. She voluntarily left after asking the manager and expected to keep all of

her service charge even though she abandoned the table early because the business was

“slow”.

3. Because we believe that Kuller was not discharged for just cause, the best remedy for her

is to get her job back with full back pay for the six months she was out of a job, minus a

suspension of two weeks for which she is not paid. She should also have to pay back the

$19.64 service charge to James. In the end, she still stole from her coworker, even if it

was a huge misunderstanding and this is why she should face a consequence of a two

week pay drought. Hopefully, this will teach her a lesson to not repeat her actions, but it

never should have gotten to the extreme of Kuller losing her job.