When can you dismiss an employee for being drunk at work?
Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this. There are a set of rules that you must abide by but that being said, you must look at each situation individually and apply each of these rules according to the specific situation.
See if the employee is able to do his job as if he is sober
If the employee comes to work drunk, but can perform his job as well as if he were sober, unfortunately, you cannot dismiss him. The court actually defines ‘being under the influence of alcohol’ as not being able to perform one’s job as if one were not under the influence of alcohol.
When can being intoxicated on the job be treated as a disciplinable offence?
When you stipulate in your policies and procedures that a certain conduct is a disciplinable offence. But remember to make your policies and procedures in keeping with the job that you’re hiring for, i.e. according to the inherent requirements of that particular job. Because if these are not in line with the inherent requirements of the job, the person on the receiving end could turn around and say that you are discriminating against him unnecessarily. Here are some acceptable cases of necessary discrimination:
- An airline pilot is not allowed to drink 24 hours before he commands a flight. This is because the inherent requirements of his job necessitate him to be focused and alert every single minute during the flights that he takes. If he is not, he could very likely be the cause of a crash of that airline.
- However, an office worker, who has consumed alcohol in the 24 hours preceeding the commencement of his job, will not be prohibited from consuming an alcohol as the alcohol in his blood stream will not hamper his ability to do his job.
So how do you avoid the situation of one of your employees being drunk at work?
Simple – institute an alcohol policy.
This policy sets out what is acceptable alcohol usage in your company. Remember that there is no “one-size-fits-all” policy for each and every company. Each alcohol policy needs to be tailor-made for every single company. For example, an alcohol policy for a company’s drivers transporting hazardous chemicals would stipulate that these drivers would need a certain blood alcohol level before they are dismissed. This blood alcohol level would be much lower than the acceptable blood alcohol level of an office worker as the inherent requirements of his job do not necessitate him having a very low blood alcohol level (the road traffic laws indicate that people performning driving work must have very low blood alcohol levels indeed).
But remember: If you don’t have an alcohol policy in place, you cannot dismiss any of your employees who are found to be drunk on work because unless you define what kind of drunken behaviour is acceptable/not acceptable at work, in some sort of policy, you will not be able to dismiss the employee as you will not have sufficient grounds to do so.
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Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company. |
