By: Elaine Quayle
It’s strange, but true. In the news, we have stories of an employer apologizing for firing an employee during World War II, and another company firing a long-time employee for something that happened 40 years ago. What are a few years between employees and termination issues anyway?
Wells Fargo Bank terminated a Wisconsin employee when it discovered she had been convicted of shoplifting in 1972, shortly after she graduated from high school 40 years ago. The employee had good performance reviews over her 5 years on the job in the mortgage department and never handled cash, according to media reports. A bank spokesman told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her employment record doesn’t matter because the organization is bound by a federal law that prohibits it from “hiring or continuing the employment of any person with a known criminal record involving dishonesty or breach of trust.”
While the employee feels that she has changed her life and shouldn’t be penalized for something that happened 4 decades ago, and is backed up by numerous posts on social media, as the employee’s termination letter stated, she is no longer eligible to work for Wells Fargo Bank.
And going back another 3 decades in time, we have the story of an Associated Press wartime reporter Edward Kennedy who was fired in 1945 for violating company policy by calling in an embargoed story about the surrender of German forces. Even though AP had posted the story, when it found out the reporter had made his own decision to breach the embargo, the reporter was expelled from France by the Allies and then terminated by AP because he had been sworn to secrecy.
However, 67 years later, the CEO of Associated Press has apologized for the way in which the termination was handled, calling the incident “the biggest scoop in its history” and saying the magnitude of the story vindicated the reporter’s actions. Unfortunately, Kennedy died in 1963.