Background:

The Respondent accepted that there was a decision to dismiss, but the decision was fair. As a result, the Respondent gave evidence first. The Respondent is a manufacturer of circuit boards which are used for camera systems it manufactures. Part of this manufacturing process was a visual inspection process which the Respondent said was critical to identify problems, and to facilitate this visual inspection, there is a specified system time delay of 0.8 seconds during which the SMT Operator would press a button to pass the product to the next stage. The Respondent learned that this pause was being overridden by workers from time to time to deliberately bypass this visual inspection process. After an investigation the Respondent