Friday, March 11, 2011

Save lives, lose your job

EssEffChron

Three cleanup workers who were hailed as heroes after finding a live bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade said they later lost their jobs after supervisors questioned their handling of the situation.

The men were employed by Labor Ready and working under contract for the Spokane Public Facilities District when they found a backpack containing the bomb about an hour before the scheduled start of the Jan. 17 parade.

They alerted police, who were able to defuse the device.

"For the first two days, basically all we did was get chewed out," worker Mark Steiner told Spokane television station KHQ. "We did this wrong. We did that wrong. I don't know what you consider calling 911 wrong after two minutes after we found it."

"I think they put themselves at more risk than they needed," Twohig said.

Burke (aka 'their boss' - G) said the men should not have picked up the backpack.

Steiner told KHQ the three men were not trained to deal with suspicious packages.

"We'd go out, and we'd clean up parking lots," he said. "Who knows what happens when you see a backpack sitting there? The first reaction is to pick it up and that's what we did, and we opened it, saw wires sticking out of it and called police."

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and Spokane Mayor Mary Verner have praised the three workers in speeches for being vigilant.

I think if you find a backpack when you're removing trash, you'd pick it up to see if it had any ID in it and you'd expect to find books or personal items in it. If I saw wires in one, there would be a short delay in calling the cops while I found a phone a mile away.

These were temp jobs and apparently these guys can still get part-time work, but it's still kinda shitty to can 'em. Employers don't give a shit about their employees doing their civic duty if it causes a delay in the job, I guess. So much for saving lives v profit. Again.

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