Drinking on the job: Firings at Chrysler

Chrysler fired 13 workers who had been after Detroit’s WJBK-TV aired footage of them drinking beer and apparently smoking dope during their unpaid lunch breaks (over a period of ten days). (You can click here to view the video.)

This is one of those situations where you wonder how common this behavior is if these guys were so easily caught on tape. (Note that they were caught despite employing the pinnacle of stealth, the brown paper bag. Seriously, a brown paper bag? If they’d been passing around a fifth of Jim Beam it couldn’t have been as obvious.)

A couple of other things to think about:

• Detroit currently has a sickening rate of unemployment, yet these 13 people were able to secure jobs.
• Chrysler was the recent recipient of a government bail-out. (Good to know that there’s little accountability going on until there’s a news camera around.) Now the company will probably start doing mandatory drug testing for all employees.
• Despite Chrysler’s claim that every line position has a backup person, what can we come to expect from the finished product? A cork screw in place of a gear shift?

So what do you think? Is imbibing during work hours a fairly common activity?

Source -- http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=2429&tag=results;CR1