Can clients terminate employees for drinking on the job, smoking marijuana in parking lots and similar violations based on an undercover investigators observations?
A. Usually undercover investigators are never exposed on these operations, but develop information which is used in eliminating the problem through “surgical” surveillance (surveillance conducted at the time an event is predictable), interrogation or other investigative methods. In other cases, for instance when an undercover investigator learns drugs are regularly kept by employees in their lockers, client response such as locker checks can solve the problem. It should also be noted here that observing or even filming an employee drinking from a liquor bottle would not stand up as proof the employee was drinking on company property. The same is true for employees observed smoking what appears to be marijuana. In these cases, employees can claim to have been drinking lemonade from liquor bottles or smoking hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes.
