The human right for McDonald's employees not to wash their hands
By Ezra Levant on April 15, 2008 4:09 PM
Listen. I love McDonald's, both for their food and for what they stand for philosophically. I thought that Super Size Me was a piece of anti-capitalist, anti-beef propaganda.
But when you're in Vancouver, skip the McDonald's on Marine Drive.
That's because the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has ruled that one of the employees there has a human right not to wash her hands when working in their kitchen.
Beena Datt claimed that she developed a "skin condition" that meant she couldn't wash her hands in compliance with McDonald's hygiene policy. That's the same hygiene policy that makes McDonald's like an embassy to Canadians travelling overseas -- when you're in a Third World country, and tired of eating in hygiene-challenged local restaurants, you can count on a western standard of cleanliness and quality at McDonald's.
In B.C., McDonald's hygiene policy isn't just a matter of corporate pride. It's a matter of the law -- both the Health Act and the Food Premises Regulations. And then there's B.C.'s Food Protection Guidelines issued by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. McDonald's subscribes to all of them. Hell, they probably helped write them.
McDonald's is fanatical about hand-washing, to their credit. They have hand-washing rules. Not just the obvious "wash your hands after the bathroom" rules. But other rules, like wash your hands after shaking someone's hand. Wash your hands after retrieving food from the freezer. Wash your hands after touching a door handle. They even have a chime that goes off every hour. It's a "we're all going to wash our hands now" chime. Seriously -- see paragraph 23 of the ruling.
Datt wouldn't wash her hands. She just wouldn't -- she said she couldn't. So her employment was terminated. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered that McDonald's pay her not only $23,000 for "lost income", but an additional $25,000 for her "dignity and self-respect". You see, in B.C. a food preparation worker's self-respect trumps a company's commitment to cleanliness. They violated her "human rights".
The $50,000+ penalty -- plus several years of legal fees and medical and rehab experts -- isn't the worst of it. Inventing a "human right" for a worker to go to the bathroom and then to handle meat without washing her hands in between, as an excuse for that $50,000 shakedown isn't the worst of it either.
The worst of it is that the BCHRT has ordered that McDonald's, in paragraph 298 of the decision, to "cease the discriminatory conduct or any similar conduct and refrain from committing the same or similar contravention."
Beena Datt and her filthy hands are gone. But the restaurant has been ordered not to enforce its hand washing policy in any future cases like Datt's.
I wonder what will happen if, God forbid, someone were to contract a disease from that McDonald's because of this insane order. Could such a victim sue McDonald's for failing to live up to its legal public health requirements, even though McDonald's wanted to do so? Or could the BCHRT itself be sued? Would your answer be different if it was just one customer who got an upset stomach -- or a dozen people dying from e. coli, Walkerton style?
http://ezralevant.com/2008/04/the-hu...mcdonalds.html
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