By David D. Schein, President & General Counsel, 
Claremont Management Group

Chrysler fired auto workers in September 2010 who were filmed on 

local TV news drinking and smoking marijuana on their lunch break. 

Chrysler was responding to public opinion when it took this obvious 

action. Last week, an arbitrator put them back to work. How could 

this miscarriage of justice occur? 

Arbitration is a confidential process, but the word is that 

Chrysler did not have sufficient evidence. Most likely, it could 

have won these cases by following it's own procedures. Generally, 

an employer's policy calls for substance abuse testing when there 

is a reasonable suspicion that an employee is under the influence.

So, supervisors would have had to observe the inebriated behavior, 

not just hear about it on the news. Then,   what ever the testing 

procedure in Chrysler's union contract would need to have  been 

followed. In most cases, this would have been urine analysis. The 

risk here is that a small amount of either alcohol or marijuana 

consumed during lunch might not have reached the minimum cut-off 

level for the testing that was done.  Further, hours or days later 

when the story was aired on TV, it would be too late to test these 

employees. What about the irrefutable film evidence? It might have 

triggered the Supervisors to carefully observe those employees, but 

it would not excuse Chrysler from fully following it's own policies. 

In a non-union environment, Chrysler might have pulled this one off. 

Although, failure to follow a company's own policies might result in 

the terminated employees still getting unemployment benefits. 

 A bitter lesson learned by Chrysler. Profit from another employer's 

mistake and follow your own policies, not the news. 

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