Ox Box Discovers (CONT’D FROM PAGE 36)
Rewriting The Rules Since the ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic are still being discovered, the rules and regulations on how governments and business owners treat their employees will have to be rewritten. And fast. “Early on in the pandemic it seemed it was pretty much “hands off” employees because there wasn’t a lot of in- formation on how to discipline someone who came in to work and knowingly infected others,” said Ockerlund, who admits to being furious when he discovered how and why his plant needed to be shut down. “But it also put us in a very awkward position. We had a difficult time blaming an employee for wanting to come to work. Yes, we spoke with him afterwards, but the damage had been done and we didn’t have anything in our handbook that addressed such an event. At the end of the day, we didn’t take any disciplinary action other than speaking to him.” Given the potential enormity of financial losses due to the negligent acts of employees, not to mention the cost of putting others’ lives at risk, many business owners are now re-writing their Policies & Procedures and Human Resource departments are readying for similar events. Should the negligent employee who came to work sick be fired? Sued? Arrested? What if the employee believed he or she had to go to work in order to save a job that brought their family the only income they had? Can the lost reve- nue from a business forced to close ever be recovered?
ing him there is a “stranger” in the building. That person is then scanned and if “in range,” can enter the building. “For us it’s been good but it doesn’t make us failsafe,” he said. “We can still have problems just like any other plant, but on the temperature thing, I feel a lot more com-
fortable that we now have a system in place so that what happened to us before couldn’t happen exactly like that to us again.” Guy Ockerlund set the top end of the temperature range of his Facemate at 99.9 degrees, so if any employee has a tempera- ture above that, he cannot clock in.
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September 14, 2020
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