A former Saskatchewan poultry worker is receiving compensation after he was wrongfully fired for an off hours dust-up in a parking lot that left his wife seriously injured at the hands of a hatchet-wielding coworker. The case, which found its terminus at Saskatoon’s Court of King’s Bench last month, stems from an incident in late 2018 at Prairie Pride Natural Foods in Saskatoon, where a long-simmering feud between two couples that worked in the same departments escalated into violence. “Animosity had long existed between the two families, with the conflict most acute between the wives,” King’s Bench Justice David Gerecke wrote. “In late 2018, that animosity erupted into a fracas in a random parking lot, with each of the husbands wielding a hatchet. One husband struck the other’s wife in the head with his hatchet. Police became involved and charges were laid. The wife who had been struck in the head with a hatchet, was left bleeding and unconscious, and was unable to work for nine months.” In the wake of this incident, according to Gerecke, Prairie Pride fired the husband whose wife was hit in the head with a hatchet. The man’s union, UFCW Local 1400, began a grievance process, arguing he had done nothing that warranted discipline. This was, after all, the husband who didn’t use his hatchet. By the time the case reached Gerecke’s desk, following two rounds of arbitration in which the man was officially cleared of any workplace wrongdoing, all the heat and drama had long dissipated. “Somehow that wound up as a dry judicial review application to me,” Gerecke wrote, as he prepared to do a final tally on the scoresheet of one husband’s star-crossed chicken processing career. UFCW had fought for the worker’s reinstatement, but the arbitrator determined that placing him back into the workplace would be problematic. Following a series of disputes between Prairie Pride and UFCW finally settled in 2024 at the provincial court of appeal, it was determined the man would be paid damages in lieu of reinstatement. Prairie Pride and UFCW spent the next two years debating how to compensate a chicken processing worker who was fired because his coworker assaulted his wife with a hatchet. In assessing the damages, the point of contention became whether to calculate the sum from the date of hiring to the date of firing, or whether he should be compensated for the time it took to get through arbitration. Ultimately, Gerecke agreed with the calculation from a second round of arbitration, which paid out until the date of termination, but applied a 25 per cent factor to increase the damages, and added interest from the date of termination until the date the case made it through the second round of arbitration. The payout for the poultry worker was less than UFCW was pushing for, but still no paltry sum. It was calculated at a rate of 1.75 months’ pay for each year of service, for nearly 9 years of service, plus 25 per cent for loss of benefits and two per cent interest from the date of firing to the date of payment. Seeing no issue with that math, Gerecke dismissed UFCW’s application for judicial review.
