Wipe floor with petty employers

JLET’S draw two circles, next to each other and overlapping. In the left one, write “food”. In the right, put “waste”. The space in the middle, where the circles meet, represents the grey area between the two.

You’ve just drawn a Venn diagram, designed to show how much different groups actually have in common.And it perfectly illustrates the hole cleaner Gabriela Rodriguez fell neatly into when she snacked on a leftover sandwich due to be thrown out after an office meeting had finished.

As you probably know, Gabriela was sacked for eating it and lost her sole means of supporting herself and her 10-year-old daughter. Just to crunch a few numbers here: Gabriela earns £13 an hour. Total Clean, the firm which fired her, posted profits of £1.6million last year.The discarded sarnie cost £1.50 from Tesco. Just so you get the general context.

Some reports say it was a tuna sandwich; others say egg and cress. What’s beyond dispute is that this was imminently due to become an ex sandwich. Destined for the bin, a classic leftover, it sat neatly in that bit of the Venn diagram between “food” and “waste”. No one from the City law firm who’d been served the sarnies was coming back for it.

The platter it sat on had been discarded. It made zero difference to anyone whether it wound up in the cleaner or her rubbish bag.

And, by the way, the law firm had previously left food in the kitchen after meetings and been happy to “offer it out” afterwards.

But in one of the most pompous, heavy-handed employment rulings I can ever remember reading, Total Clean boss Graham Peterson told Gabriela, 39: “I have decided your conduct’s resulted in a fundamental breach of your contractual terms which irrevocably destroys the trust and confidence necessary to continue the employment relationship... you are therefore dismissed with immediate effect... you’re not entitled to notice or pay in lieu of notice.”

The law firm involved said it made no formal complaint against this poor woman and expressly told Total Clean not to take any action against her. Now Gabriela’s launched an unfair dismissal claim. Let us hope that she takes these tiny-minded tyrants to the cleaners.