BENTONVILLE — Give some credit to David Hadsell for bowing out of his job of manager of the Rogers Recycling Center as gracefully as he could.
Hadsell fully accepted the blame - and his termination - after three community-service workers at the recycling center were found last week working inside a paper baler while it was running. The baler had jammed, and the workers were inside it trying to fix the problem.
Hadsell was away at the time of the incident, picking up recyclables. Rogers city facilities development manager David Hook discovered the situation when he happened to drop by.
Hook wrote what he witnessed to Mayor Steve Womack. The same day, Womack fired Hadsell.
Termination seemed like a rather harsh punishment if this was Hadsell's first error on the job. It appears, however, that Womack and Hadsell didn't exactly see eye to eye; both men acknowledged differences ofphilosophy in running the center, and Womack described last week's incident as "the culminating event."
But Hadsell took full responsibility for the baler event, which could have resulted in serious injury to the workers.
"Leaving the center with that machine on should have never happened," he said. He added that he cherished his time with the city, a nice display of class on his part.
It's a fact of the working world that managers frequently leave their workers unattended, and 99 percent of the time, no harm comes from it. But when the workers are of the temporary kind - unfamiliar with (and perhaps indifferent to) the rules of the workplace - strict supervision is necessary.
Nobody got hurt in the baler.
That was a blessing, but it was also a stroke of luck. The city has to protect its workers, not to mention itself from lawsuits.
If that means finding a new manager for the recycling center, so be it.
Opinion, Pages 4 on 09/24/2009