Quote Originally Posted by Hermes14 View Post
Pakt -

Vanash -

Vanash the South African law defines theft as the unlawful and intentional removal of movable property.
If the manager had not given her permission to eat from his personal cupboard & the matter went to court The cleaner would have been found guilty.
The problem over here is the manager gave his consent for her to remove (eat) from his cupboard & therefore would be thrown out of court.
If the matter goes to the CCMA her union representative will argue the same point.

Let's say the client's manager does want to press charges.
The commissioner of Oath that is taking the statement on behalf of the manager is supposed to state at the bottom of the statement “I have not given …. (the accused) permission to take anything from my cupboard”.
The client's manager would not be able to sign the statement because he would be making a false statement under Oath.


A few years ago I was the security manager at a large corporate company where one manager complained that milk was being stolen from their fridge.
During my investigation I found that another junior manager had given the cleaner permission to take any milk that was left in the fridge on a Friday afternoon as it would be sour by the Monday morning.
I called both managers together & they sorted the problem out.

If I was Pakt I would contact the “client's”manager & inform him of the situation that he has put the cleaning company in.
I would suggest that the cleaner is removed from this site & replace with another cleaner who is unknown to this cleaner.
I would then rewrite the job description & in the job description state that anything removed from the client's premises without written consent will be considered as theft & result in immediate dismissal.
This is why I've already summed it as follows:

In SA Commercial Catering & Allied Workers Union obo Bolashe and Pinzon Traders (PTY) ltd, an employee was dismissed for petty theft for eating some bread which was returned by a customer at the bakery where he worked. The company did have a policy that stated that perishable items should not be resold or given to staff for health reasons, this bread must be given to the pigs literally at the farms.
So this employee for whatever reason decided to eat some bread from the collection of other disposable perishables just on its way to the pig farm.

The court found that dismissal as a sanction was found to be too harsh in the circumstances
A further LRA element is awareness of the rule broken, the employee must be aware. What if this employee says, ‘Well, I was allowed to make myself tea, coffee and sandwiches from the company fridge and I was also allowed to eat all the left overs, so when I ate the chocolate, I didn’t realize that I was not allowed to do so.’

How then do you reasonably respond to this declaration?
The court by default will have to balance the common law duty of the employee to act in good faith and that employers must only use dismissal as a last resort.

The situation would be wholly different if the chocolate is part of a retailers inventory and for sale to the public by display on various shelving. If an employee take an item from this shelf and eats the item, then it can’t be said that the employee didn’t know. Such rules are so obvious they needn’t be formally mentioned.

The point of departure is always consider each case on its own merits and circumstances