Criminals are not exactly renowned for their intelligence. The myth of the ‘criminal genius’ is just that. What criminals do have, though, is a long streak of rat-cunning. If police or politicians decide not to pursue ‘low-level’ crime like shoplifting, it takes the scumbags (the thieves, that is, not the politicians… oh, I give up…) all of a nanosecond to act accordingly. Ask any retail worker and they’ll tell it’s a daily occurrence to have to stand by and watch as thieves brazenly walk out with armloads of stuff.
They do it because they know that, not only do they have police and politicians on their side, but management are too gutless to do anything about it, either. Any staff who try and do the right thing are almost certain to get sacked.
This is exactly what happened to a bottle-o worker, here in Tassie. Except that, in a rare outbreak of common sense, the company has been told to give the hero employee her job back.
A Tasmanian bottle shop worker known as “The Enforcer” who was sacked for using a roller door to deter would-be-thieves has won her job back.
Wendy Blair worked at a BWS outlet in Prospect Vale that was targeted by offenders more than a dozen times between June, 2025, and January this year.
Gangs, sometimes masked in balaclavas, would swarm in and simply loot the place. Management’s response? A policy that told staff to be polite, not to intervene and not even to call the police until the thieves had finished and left. Armed or unarmed, the instruction was the same: do nothing that might ‘antagonise’ the criminals. In other words, a green light to ransack whatever they felt like.
Blair, being an actual human being rather than a corporate risk-management flowchart, occasionally forgot the script. In July she grabbed at a thief’s bag on the way out and copped a first-and-final warning. In September, during another swarming, she made the unforgivable split-second decision to start lowering the roller door and told two balaclava-clad offenders they needed to leave. Colleagues stuck a sticker on the door reading “Wendy ‘The Enforcer’ Roller Door”. Management left it there for months as a light-hearted joke.
Ms Blair told the hearing she was never warned about using the roller door and that she believed the nickname and sticker meant her conduct was supported.
But the use of the roller door was contrary to BWS staff policy and, following another swarming incident in January, in which Ms Blair again lowered the roller door to deter a gang of three thieves, she was sacked.
During the FWC hearing, Endeavour said it could no longer trust Ms Blair “not to engage in conduct that would endanger herself or others”, which Mr Redford described as “misplaced” concern.
Fair Work Commissioner Ben Redford was not impressed. He noted that Blair had never been warned about the roller-door tactic after the September incident, that the sticker and nickname suggested her actions were tolerated and that there was “not the remotest of prospects” she would repeat the behaviour. He ordered her reinstatement and 50 per cent back pay.
It’s not all good news, though. In keeping with the tilty-head disengagement from reality of the bureaucratic class, the commissioner still had plenty of finger-wagging for her.
He said Ms Blair had accepted now she had done the wrong thing and that because she believed she was not warned against using the roller door after the September incident, the January incident “was not a repeated course of conduct”.
“I consider … there is not the remotest of prospects that in a future theft incident, [Ms Blair] would use the roller door in the way she did,” Mr Redford said.
In other words: steal away, crims. No one’s going to stop you, now.
The company’s unarmed-theft policy advised “polite engagement”, because criminals are known for their willingness to politely talk things out and renounce their law-breaking ways. The armed-robbery policy advised no engagement at all. Both forbade calling police until the offenders had departed. As the commissioner dryly observed, an employee under pressure might have to decide, instantaneously, which policy applied. Heaven forbid the staff member should treat a masked gang raiding the till as something other than valued customers who simply hadn’t paid yet.
For once, a union is doing what it’s supposed to, and actually sticking up for workers.
The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA) has celebrated the win and called on the Tasmanian government to fast-track proposed workplace protection legislation […]
In June, Attorney-General Guy Barnett began consultation on a proposed Workplace Protection Order scheme, which would allow businesses to apply for orders protecting workplaces and employees.
“We know that incidents of aggressive and intimidating behaviour towards workers – especially in retail, hospitality and service environments – are a significant and growing concern,” Mr Barnett said at the time.
Until then, the message from head office remains clear: your safety is our highest priority, provided it never involves inconveniencing the people who are actively endangering it.
Blair should never have been sacked. She did what any normal person would do when a pack of balaclava-wearing thugs storms the shop. The real scandal is the corporate cowardice that treats retail workers as disposable hostages and the criminals as a protected class.
And it’s us, the mugs who actually obey the law, who’ll end up paying for it from the hip pocket.
