Where there's a distinction in a suspension

One of the issues that most teachers do not prepare people for early enough in school, or at home, come to think of it, is how to make a distinction where there are differences. Is it because teachers are themselves unable to make those distinctions?

A neighbour of mine once told me in awe that her three-year-old son was expelled from nursery school for sexually harassing a three-year-old girl. The teacher saw him putting his little arms around an equally little girl and kissing her. He did not know that was wrong, neither did she – in both of their families parents and siblings were encouraged to show each other affection – but the teacher, soaked in an obsessive form of feminist victimhood, equated normal childhood affection with sexuality which is a prime example of being unable to make a distinction where there is a difference.

I had a housekeeper who took that inability to a fine art. If I came home after leaving her alone in the house all day and found a Lalique vase shattered in pieces on the floor and asked in horror what had happened, she would never admit she had broken it. She just looked amazed and indignant and said, as though asking: "What is wrong? You blind or something? Can’t you see?" Then she would say, "It broke.” A lot of things got "broke" when she was alone in the house. She did not know how to distinguish where there was a difference between the active first person form of the verb – I broke – and the passive third person – It broke.

Baroness Nancy Seares, who spent over ten years in the English House of Lords, was a prominent social scientist and for many years a leader of the English Labour Party. A noted advocate for equal pay for work of equal value between men and women, (a target still not achieved in most patriarch-dominated cultures, and I am not referring to Afghanistan here) she was also an often acerbic critic of whining feminist claims of victimhood – to paraphrase Winston Churchill – “up with which she would not put.” During one of her lectures in logic at the London School of Economics she pointed out the need to make distinctions where there were differences, a lesson that I never forgot.

It is a more than necessary lesson in the conduct of industrial relations among practitioners on both the management and trade-union sides, as it is necessary between parents and children, teachers and students, and among adults generally. In industrial relations, suspension is a recognised form of response to a breach of discipline or contract. However, there are two different forms of suspension. A disciplinary suspension which can be a step in the traditional disciplinary process of step one – warning for a first offence; step two – warning for a second offence; step three – warning for a third offence; step four – suspension for the fourth offence; and step five – dismissal for the sixth offence.

Then there is an investigatory suspension which is taken when it is suspected or reported that an offence has taken place. In the first kind of offence, when proof of the offence is beyond doubt, eg, latecoming, absenteeism, destruction of tools or property etc (the list is endless) but is either admitted or beyond question, the suspension is a punitive one; without pay for the days not worked while on suspension. This must be stated in writing in the company rules or handbook so employees know what the potential consequences of their actions will be. One company I worked with worded it: “This form of suspension is intended to enable you to consider whether you want to continue to work with this company.”

The investigatory suspension, however, is imposed without pay, during which time evidence must be gathered from records, interviews with witnesses, examination of past employee records, if the offence involved destruction of equipment, tools, or property, the cost of replacement, or, if it involved wilful damage to the reputation of the company, or its products or services. If the employee is found to be not guilty upon investigation, the salary lost can be repaid. Where the charge involves a criminal offence and police action leads to a court case, it is common for the defendant and his or her union rep, or attorney, to argue that disciplinary action must await the outcome of the court judgment.

Given the years it may take for the criminal case to be put on the court schedule, where it is a case of theft or fraud for example, this may be impactive. In one early case, a Woolworths’ employee caught with company products in her bag and dismissed for theft waited for several years for her case to be heard. She was freed by the court when the evidence had disappeared while in police custody. It was claimed that rats had eaten it. The union then demanded that Woolworths give the employee back her job on the grounds that the criminal court had found her not guilty by dismissing the case. Again failure to make a distinction. She was not found to be not guilty, and therefore innocent of the charge. It was found that there was no evidence to prove her guilt. There is a distinction.

A similar thing happened in a Jamaican case where the cook in a hotel kitchen baked a load of brownies laced with ganga and shared them out with fellow employees. At that time, consumption of narcotics on the job was a criminal as well as a disciplinary offence. When the cook and accomplices were dismissed on the disciplinary charge of unauthorised production of food for personal consumption, and for unsuitable performance (they were all as high as kites), the case was dismissed in the criminal court because the evidence had disappeared, having been eaten. But not before the tribunal.

In the civil courts, which industrial courts and tribunals come under, judgments are made on the basis of a balance of probabilities, not evidence beyond a shadow of doubt, and you cannot escape the consequences of your own actions by eating it.