Tree Gang PT. 50: Malcolm has trouble with a co-worker

“OH for heaven’s sake! What’s he done now?” said Malcolm, returning to the team from a focus meeting.

“Stepped on a nail,” said Karl. “Don’s taken him home.”

Malcolm groaned. The latest team member, Lee Graham, was proving to be a liability.

When he wasn’t on his phone, he was standing around smoking. The rest of the time he was off on the sick. Malcolm took out his notebook and started taking down details. “So. What happened?”

READ MORE: Tree Gang Pt. 42: A journey up the ladder of council arb

“He was crushing down a load of brash on the van when he stepped on a plank with a nail through it.”

“I thought you were crown raising? How did a plank of wood get on the back?”

“Spudda chucked a load on. Said he’s going to make gates with them.”

Typical, thought Malcolm. Spudda was a different sort of liability. Forever on the lookout for ways to make money, he would pick up any old rubbish he thought he could turn a bob on. Malcolm had plain refused to take such stuff to his house so now he dropped his scavenging haul off at the council yard for when his wife came to collect him after work.

Malcolm could never decide if this was better or worse. 

“I don’t want to know what scheme that skip-rat lunatic has cooked up. Was it a big nail?” 

“Six inches. Right through his foot. Poor lad is cursed with bad luck.”

Jack Dry wasn’t having any of it. “Bad luck my arse! He’s got chronic idle-itous. The lad’s so bone idle, I bet he wouldn’t even lift the remote to change the TV channel.”

“Well, he’ll be on a stage-two sick review after this,” said Malcolm.

Jack winked. “I’ll bet it won’t go to stage three though. The kid’s Teflon. Nothing sticks to him. He plays the system like Elton John plays the piano.”

Malcolm sighed. Jack was probably right. Sickness and accidents had always been a part of council work and ‘throwing a sickie’ was often taken as a euphemism for an unofficial day off, but times were changing. In an attempt to rein in abuse of the system, limits had been set. Three separate occasions of absence in a 12-month period or more than nine days of continuous absence triggered an informal review. Targets for attendance were set (no absence in a three-month period) and if exceeded then you were bumped up to formal stage one, where new targets were set and so on up to formal stage three, which could result in dismissal.

Jack nudged Malcolm and gave him a wicked grin. “You’ll be getting a phone call soon, I expect?”

“I know,” said Malcolm, resignedly. Since becoming union rep for the area he was spending far too much time representing members at sickness hearings. In this regard Lee was a frequent flyer. 

“Why couldn’t he have joined another bloody union?” muttered Malcolm to himself.

He didn’t mind sitting on the reviews. Nails were just one of the many everyday tree-work hazards and Malcolm, being no stranger to injury himself, liked to see fair play. When others got hauled up for accidents that weren’t their fault he was eager to help out. However, many folk, like workshy Lee, took a somewhat lax and peculiar view of their own responsibilities and expected Malcolm to perform miracles in their defence.

“No,” Malcolm would find himself saying to some careless member. “Slicing your leg with a hedge trimmer because you took the blade guard off is not the fault of the machine.”

On one occasion a member asked Malcolm if he could get compensation for a knee injury incurred on holiday in Cornwall.

“Why on earth would you think you’d be entitled to compensation?” asked Malcolm.

The man looked affronted that he had even dared to question the idea. “Because my manager told me I couldn’t carry my holidays over to the new year. If they hadn’t forced me to go away I wouldn’t have twisted my knee.”

Howls of indignation and disbelief would often accompany a member being told their case had less chance of holding water than a kitchen colander.

However, Lee understood the system and was a dab hand at working it. Instead of odd days off he would take a week, so it only counted as a single occasion, and if things got too close to the dreaded stage three he’d be off a month or more. This being because anything over four weeks switched the sickness procedure from general absence to the similar, but separate, procedure for long-term absence, effectively resetting the clock and kicking the staging process back to the beginning.

When Lee was still off after three weeks, it looked like this was going to be his strategy.

With a genuine accident under his belt it seemed a good bet. Surely nobody would accuse him of deliberately spiking his own foot? However, Malcolm knew that things rarely ran the way you expected. He was right.

“They’re charging me with gross incompetence,” said Lee, in a desperate phone call to Malcolm one morning.

It seemed like overkill and Malcolm was curious as to what line HR were taking with their investigation. “How do they figure that?”

“They say I wasn’t wearing the right footwear.”

“Ah,” said Malcolm, remembering how the council had tried the same line with him a few years back. Lack of correct PPE was considered gross incompetence and a surefire fast track to instant dismissal.

“Were you?” asked Malcolm, knowing full well Lee was one of those who took a somewhat laissez-faire approach to work attire. It wouldn’t have surprised Malcolm if he’d been wearing trainers on the day.

“Yes, sort of,” said Lee, on the other end of the phone.

Malcolm could almost hear Lee’s chances of future employment fleeing like rats from a house fire. “What do you mean, sort of?”

“The boots the council gave us were too stiff, they hurt my feet, and so I bought myself another pair.”

“Okay... Tell me, do they have steel toe caps?”

“Yeah, course they do. I’m not stupid.”

Malcolm held off judgement on that last comment. “British safety standard?”

“Um… I think so.”

“Where did you get them from?”

“Spudda sold them to me.”

Malcolm groaned as a cloister bell tolled doom through his mind. Car-boot Spudda was certainly not a reliable source of safety footwear. The boots were probably a knock-off Spudda had bought in some car park.

Nevertheless, Malcolm called round on Lee to give the boots the once over. To his surprise they seemed genuine work boots, with proper steel toe caps. The only flaw was a six-inch nail hole through the sole. 

After seeing Lee he went and called on Russell Barrett, the convener, to check through the PPE policy. It turned out council workers were allowed their own boots as long as they met the BS standards dictated in the council’s health-and-safety directive. Lee’s boots seemed up to standard, so Malcolm wondered what the problem was.

He went in search of Spudda and found him rummaging through the tip on the yard. “Oy, Spudda! Where did those boots you sold Lee come from?” He wondered if maybe HR investigators had spotted them as fake or something.

Spudda answered: “I got them for free off one of the binmen who was retiring.”

“Free?” Malcolm smiled. Lee claimed he’d paid Spudda £15.

Leaping to his own defence, Spudda added: “The bloke got them straight off the council. He didn’t pay for them, so I didn’t cheat him.”

“Yeah, but Lee...”

“Oh that’s just business. They’re good boots. Worth £15.”

“Never mind,” said Malcolm, thinking if the boots were council-bought what were they coming down on Lee over? Time for another look at the health-and-safety policy.

Even so, when the day of the hearing came, Malcolm was still unsure what angle management was using to claim gross misconduct. They all gathered in an overheated meeting room in the town hall. Malcolm and Lee sat on one side of the huge leather-covered table, while the director and Malcolm’s boss, Alan Chesterfield, sat across from them with a representative of HR.

After hearing Lee’s account of the accident they finally got down to the nub of the accusation and outlined the potential outcome of dismissal.

“I am afraid I have been made aware that Lee wasn’t wearing appropriate safety footwear,” said the director.

“By whom?” asked Malcolm.

Alan jumped in quick. “Those boots he wore weren’t the ones I issued him with. He has to wear council-issue boots.”

“Not so fast,” said Malcolm. “Workers are allowed to wear their own footwear if it meets with council standards. Besides, the boots in question were bought by the council. I checked.”

“That may be so,” said the HR representative. “However, clearly they were not up to a suitable standard, otherwise the nail would not have penetrated the sole.”

“And what standard would that be?” asked Malcolm carefully.

Alan replied: “As outlined in the H&S policy. He should have had steel insoles to protect his foot.”

Malcolm smiled. “And can you point to exactly where in the policy, here before us, it mentions steel insoles? I’ve had a good look and can only see steel toe caps mentioned.”

Across the table, three frowning faces leafed through the documents laid out in front of them.

“Surely it is implied,” said the director.

Malcolm said: “Not from where I’m standing and it isn’t written, is it? And if you were to take a look at the boots the council issues, I’ll bet they don’t have steel insoles either.”

“This is true,” the HR rep agreed reluctantly. “The ones with steel insoles came out too expensive.”

After this there was no case for Lee to answer. He went off on a drawn-out three-month recovery and Malcolm went back to his trees. Sitting in his harness high above the ground he looked out over the houses, glad not to be sat in a meeting. He had chosen to be a union rep out of necessity, but really his heart was here in the outdoors.

Some time later, Lee returned just in time to receive his hand-picked new boots. The council had issued a change of health-and-safety policy and ordered a whole load of new steel insole footwear for its workers. 

Lee wore his new boots all morning, but after lunch Malcolm noticed he had swapped them for a pair of ordinary Doc Martens, sans steel insoles, sans steel toe caps.

“Oy! Why aren’t you wearing your new boots after all the trouble I went to to save your job?”

“They’re too cold on my feet,” complained Lee.

Malcolm could have throttled him. “Have you ever considered joining another union?”