Termination without notice because of ten minutes? A court has now decided how supervisors can deal with fraudulent working hours.
Employers can terminate employees without notice if working hours are fraudulent. This also applies if an employee only goes to drink coffee for about ten minutes and does not punch out the electronic time recording.
A warning is unnecessary if the employee denies and conceals his act. In this case, a single misconduct may be sufficient. What matters is what you do afterwards. This is shown by a judgment by the Hamm Regional Labor Court (Az.: 13 Sa 1007/22). The Bund-Verlag reports on the case.
The case in detail
A cleaner clocked in at the company at the start of her working day. A short time later she went to a restaurant across the street to have a coffee there. She didn’t stamp herself.
The boss watched the cleaner. When he asked her about her behavior, she initially denied it. It was only when the boss offered to show her photos of evidence on his cell phone that the cleaning lady admitted to her wrongdoing.
Termination without notice
The employer terminated the woman, who is severely disabled with a degree of disability of 100 percent, without notice. He had previously obtained the approval of the Inclusion Office.
The cleaner appealed against this decision. She felt the dismissal was disproportionate. Her argument: It was a one-off misconduct.
The judgment
The court ruled that the dismissal was lawful. In the case of intentional misuse of a time clock, there is an important reason that justifies termination without notice. The breach of trust is significant. The employer must be able to rely on the fact that the working hours of his employees are correctly documented.
Even if it was only about ten minutes in this case, a warning was unnecessary. According to the court, this would not have resulted in the employee changing her behavior.
What was decisive was the behavior after the crime – the court considered it particularly serious that the woman had lied to her boss when asked and initially denied and covered up the fraud.
