Do New York state Walmart stores enjoy getting lots of social media attention for their reasons for firing workers? Right around the time an Albany man was fired from Walmart after he redeemed some cans he found on store property (an incident Walmart keeps changing its story about), a Schenectady man was fired for waiting 30 whole minutes to turn in $350 he found in his store’s parking lot:
Walsh said he found a $5 bill in the parking lot and immediately went inside and turned it over to a manager. When he went back outside — his job involved picking up garbage and collecting stray shopping carts — he found a small stack of bills, $20s and $10s, in the parking lot. It was not in an envelope and bore no identification.
He completed his task and when he got a moment, he counted the cash: $350. He stuffed it in his pants pocket. He went back inside the store, which is adjacent to a Berkshire Bank branch, and was about to turn in the bundle when he heard a commotion.
"A woman was yelling at a manager, freaking out that she lost her money and I got nervous," said Walsh, who speaks haltingly and has anxiety issues. "I kind of froze and didn't want any trouble."
Walsh returned to his job, which included cleaning the bathrooms, and he gave a manager the $350 in cash about 30 minutes after he found it. The manager took the money and Walsh heard nothing more.
Two days later, Walsh was fired because of the 30 minutes Walmart surveillance footage revealed between when he found the money and when he turned it in. Even though he turned it in voluntarily.
Would the ideal response have been to immediately walk up to the manager the woman was yelling at and hand over the money? Most likely. But it’s not hard to imagine someone with anxiety issues freezing up under those circumstances—a low-level worker walking up to a manager facing a yelling customer is probably not going to be welcomed with open arms at first even if it turns out he has the solution to the problem. And again, Walsh brought the cash to a manager within about 30 minutes of finding it. Once it was turned in, why was Walmart even looking at the surveillance footage to find fault with him?
Walsh had been a Walmart maintenance worker for 18 years without problems, worked full time, and had recently gotten a raise to $14.35 an hour, close to the $15 limit for maintenance workers.
