The employer may bear some of the blame, but they have already paid for that mistake in lost productivity and other possible damages to their business. Their own fault and they have already paid for it.

There is no need for them to further compensate a dishonest and incompetent employee

Oh, totally agree. Apologies if my comment above makes it sound like I support the outcome of this fatuous process.

In the current case the employer got off lightly at $10k. Arguably he should be facing east and praying 5 times a day. If the apprentice got fried it would have cost the employer a hefty 6 figure sum all up.

The employer may bear some of the blame, but they have already paid for that mistake in lost productivity and other possible damages to their business. Their own fault and they have already paid for it.

There is no need for them to further compensate a dishonest and incompetent employee for “distress compensation”. That’s completely bonkers. Look at this side-on and you’ll see that it is a case of dishonesty being rewarded and good faith being penalised.

One could also argue that the employee should return their salary for misrepresenting themselves for financial gain. But in this case neither side should be compensated.

ERA for dumb arse decision and not punishing lying worker who mearly killed a fellow employee

Employer for not reference checking better( although I have been caught when the reference was in cohots with the employee)

Worker for lying and as others have said should on the next plane back to SA

Turns out the box was in fact live, and sparky said I would likely have been killed if I’d touched the thing with a screwdriver.

Scary shit.

The problem is that the government only cares about process. There’s no thought spared to things like merit, or intent, or basic common sense. It matters not whether the employee is a lying, thieving scumbag who intended to rip the system from day one. That’s irrelevant. All that matters is whether the employer followed the byzantine process that the govt says they must follow.

The very fact that were were so many lies in his resume means that if even one thread had been picked th whole thing would have unravelled.

I’ve just spent a year restructuring a business robbed blind in just six months by a guy. Who then had the temerity to sue for wrongful dismissal (I won that, but still…). I check the CV he’d been employed on and here we have a suburban solicitor who’d supposedly managed an oil exploration company in Kazaksthan and whose reference was someone at the US State Department. It took me about 10 minutes to demolish that, with a (bounced) email and a phone call.

Lo and behold, with an active police investigation on him I find he’s employed in the same industry in a nearby town. To cap it off, the owners of that business had family connections to the owners of the business I’d restructured. I suppose he may not have listed the business I’d just rescued on his CV but since it was his first foray into that industry if that was the case then it means two businesses took him into a senior role with no experience in their area of operation. And without testing the rest of his resume.

I warned his new employers and evidently they got rid of him. Then a few months later I find he’s handing out business cards announcing he’s now CEO of yet another company in the same industry. So no reference checking again.

At that point I gave up. If employers are going to be that slack, then they really ought not to be in business anyway and if he succeeds in making off with a sufficiently large amount of money (otherwise the police, it seems, can barely be bothered prosecuting) perhaps he’ll finally end up behind bars where he belongs.

and then everyone will be moaning about how bad employment is and how low wages are….

its a no brainer.

However, these wierd and confused rulings are not much of a disincentive to employ people. The market prices it in by just having lower wage rates. So the cost is borne by honest and competent employees, not by the employer. The cost of sick leave abuse is much higher. Anyway I doubt someone like this would get past the probation period now.

I do wonder though about employers not checking references. When this is done at all, it is typically done at the end after putting time into interviewing the person. Just calling a referee up front can save a lot of time and help narrow down the list to a couple of suitable people.

In which case the would be no need for ERA! Well done!

Is anyone else here unsurprised the dodgy sparky in this story is a South African?