The Fair Work Commission has ordered Endeavour Group to reinstate a 67-year-old Tasmanian retail worker dismissed over her response to a store theft, in a decision with direct lessons for any fuel and convenience operator whose staff face the same split-second situations.
The Prospect Vale Incident
Wendy Blair had worked for the company for around 17 years when three offenders swarmed the BWS store at Prospect Vale, near Launceston, in January and began filling bags with liquor. Blair began lowering the front roller door to encourage them to leave; one offender threw a bottle that struck a colleague. She was dismissed. The store had logged roughly 16 theft-related incidents in the preceding seven months, and its manager told the Commission “it wasn’t a fun place to work at for a period of time.”
The Two-Policy Problem
The employer ran two theft policies: polite engagement for unarmed theft, and no engagement at all for armed robbery, with alarms and police calls only after offenders left. Commissioner Ben Redford found the distinction could demand the impossible: “At worst, it might require an employee to make a decision, instantaneously and under pressure, as to whether the incident is ‘armed’ or not.”
The Sticker on the Door
History mattered. Blair had received a first and final warning after physically grabbing an offender’s bag in mid-2025, a clear policy breach. But when she later lowered the roller door on two balaclava-clad offenders, no action was taken; colleagues nicknamed her “The Enforcer” and a sticker celebrating it stayed up near the door for months. The Commissioner found this was reasonably taken as approval of the tactic, so the January incident “was not a repeated course of conduct”. The dismissal was ruled harsh, and reinstatement ordered with half her lost pay. Notably, the Commission did not endorse the conduct itself: the roller door response was something staff “should not engage in”, better addressed by counselling and training than termination.
The Wider Numbers
The backdrop is a hardening environment for retail staff: industry data for 2024 recorded a 66 per cent jump in weapon-related events and violence or threats in one of every four retail crime incidents. Tasmania is consulting on a Workplace Protection Order scheme, with draft legislation expected later this year.
A Note for Independent Operators
The lesson is not that staff should intervene, it’s that ambiguity is the employer’s liability. If your site has no written theft-response policy, or a policy your team can’t apply in the three seconds it takes a drive-off or robbery to unfold, this decision is the reason to fix it: one clear rule, trained and refreshed, applied consistently every time, including when the outcome happens to go well. Celebrating an intervention one month and dismissing over it the next is exactly what the Commission would not accept.