Walmart worker claims he was sacked for keeping parking lot trash

When the manager asked Smith to return the $5.10 he got from redeeming the cans, he didn’t have the cash on him, but he paid the money back on Sunday after a one-hour bus ride.

A manager said surveillance cameras caught Smith redeeming the cans and bottles, tantamount to theft of Walmart property. “They were garbage”, Smith said, insisting he was never informed of the rule.

He took those cans and bottles inside to redeem them for money from the machine where Smith also said he spotted another cart with bottles and cans left behind by somebody. “They were garbage”, Smith told the Albany Times Union. “I didn’t even get a chance to explain myself”. “They certainly didn’t indicate that both when I talked to them and our attorney talked to them”, Alice Green of the Center for Law and Justice said of that claim.

Smith, who is on parole after serving 15 years in prison for armed robbery, said he was sacked just a few weeks before his 90-day probationary period that would have guaranteed him a 10-percent discount and other benefits from the store. He fetched them a cart and they dumped several plastic bags of empty cans and bottles into the cart.

“She [his manager] said, ‘Well that’s stealing.’ I said, ‘I did not know I was stealing or anything, ‘” Smith said. Smith says he wrote out a statement for managers acknowledging he’d recycled the cans and no more.

The country is rallying behind a man who was sacked from his minimum wage job at Walmart.

On the day he was sacked, Smith, a formerly homeless ex-convict who has a learning disability, had stayed three hours past the normal end of his shift, having agreed to work extra time on a day when the East Greenbush, New York, store was short-staffed.

“It raised issues of race and gender”, Green told the Times-Union. The store did not give him a copy, and refused to share the statement with WNYT.

Do you think Walmart should be able to fire an employee for redeeming a few dollars worth of cans picked up on store property, or is there more to this story? According to Smith, he was addicted to cocaine and heroin at the time, and robbed a bank to pay for the habit.