Annals of Dubious Management: Chipotle Terminates a 'Frequent Flyer'

It was a slam dunk case: Chipotle senior managers had it all on tape: on December 29, 2014, there was Jeanette Ortiz, general manager for the Mexican Grill near the Fresno State campus, crouching in front of the safe. She removed an envelope, extracted a bunch of bills and fanned them theatrically. She peaked over her shoulder to make sure no one was looking. Her actions were right out of central casting. Ortiz, 42, a long-time employee with nine children and known financial struggles, with annual pay around $70k, was caught in the act of stealing $626 from the company. Coincidentally, she had recently filed her fourth work comp claim, this time for carpal tunnel. (She continued working, despite the pain and the diagnosis.)

A few weeks later, Chipotle fired her. Ortiz denied taking the money. She asked to see the video. Unfortunately, the company had a policy of not showing videos to employees and anyway, someone screwed up and the tape had not been saved. It also seems that management had deleted all the text messages and lost all the notes specifying the reasons for firing Ortiz. I guess we'll just have to take their word that the theft actually happened. Or not.

Retaliation, Defamation, and All That Jazz

Ortiz sued for wrongful termination. In addition to the absence of physical evidence, a former assistant manager testified that he last saw the infamous envelope on December 30, the day after the alleged tape was made.

As we read in the Fresno Bee, a few weeks ago jurors in Fresno Superior Court awarded Ortiz just under $8 million, ruling that she was the victim of a scheme to defame her and avoid the work comp liability. Last week the jury awarded punitive damages as part of a confidential settlement, presumably in the same ball park as the original $8 million. Thus, in order to avoid a comp claim that may have run $60K, and in order to fire a worker whose performance, despite occasional absences, had been stellar, Chipotle pays out $15+ million. That's a whole lot of burritos!

Chipotle's website highlights the advantages of a Chipotle career: "With a tradition of mentorship and promoting management from within, Chipotle is a place to build a career and have fun while you're at it." Not exactly Jeanette Ortiz's experience, but then again, her abbreviated career set her up for a very comfortable life of leisure, excepting, of course, the challenges of raising all those children.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Since 1990 Jon Coppelman has trained thousands of business owners from Main Street to Fortune 500 on the fundamentals of workers’ compensation cost control. From 2006 to 2012 he was a principal writer for the Workers’ Comp Insider, LynchRyan’s first-in-the-nation blog dedicated to risk management issues. He currently divides his time between his consulting businesses and his role as Senior Workers’ Compensation Consultant for the Renaissance Alliance, an aggregator based in Wellesley, MA serving more than 90 local agencies across New England.

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