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Comment by kfoley | Hacker News Reader

> When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.

Do you have a source for this? It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.

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That kinda buries the lede there. I imagine that type of defense (being able to have input on whether or how cameras are employed) would seem pretty sweet to a bunch of Amazon drivers right now.

Now as far as the urinating in batter? Abhorrent, and disgusting. Totally worth a firing or severance with cause. Contract's a contract though. You catch that sort of thing, when you're doing something you've promised specifically not to do, you better bloody have an alternate way of acting on it.

Also, I'd need deets. I'd actually not be convinced of a breach if the work was being done somewhere with a security camera and somebody caught him doing so on unrelated footage. There's a difference between "here's your company issued camera to surveil yourself" and "WTF the security guy was reviewing some footage for something else, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"

It's called good faith. Not everyone has it, and it leads to some shitty behavior, but it is what it is. No reason to demonize a union over.

> It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.

It's also the kind of thing that every party involved would try very hard to keep on the down low. I can definitely see it not making the news since there's probably only about half a dozen people party to it and nobody is a celebrity or otherwise public personality.

Then how does this person know about it?

Without evidence, assume it's invented anti-union bullshit.

Because it's the kind of thing that makes it around the workplace.

Nobody's gonna leak that to the news because "trashy line cook does something trashy" isn't really a story worth getting a new job over. You just joke about it with your coworkers friends and move on.

> Then how does this person know about it?

I was there when it happened.

This happened in 2004 or 2005. My memory isn't good enough to land on the exact year.

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