Coke Canada Bottling terminates worker injured on the job, says keeping him would be too hard on the company

Shawne Hopkins never saw it coming.

After spending 35 years as a factory worker for Coca-Cola Canada Bottling Limited, Hopkins says his bosses terminated him last month in a five-minute phone call with no benefits and no severance.

"Thirty-five years, not even a handshake,” said the 57-year-old Airdrie, Alta., man who was seriously injured on the job two years earlier. 

On Jan. 8, 2024, Hopkins says a 907 kg overhead sliding door malfunctioned while he was trying to open it. The force "tore the flap right out" of Hopkins' shoulder joint, also damaging his arm and neck.

"Insane pain. It was really, really bad," Hopkins told Go Public. He says he repeatedly warned a Coca-Cola Bottling supervisor and the maintenance department about the door months before the injury. He says nothing was done.

Hopkins believes his employer's lack of action led to his injury and ultimately his termination. CBC News asked Coca-Cola Bottling about that. It did not answer those questions. 

When the company let Hopkins go, it cited a rarely-used legal doctrine that lets employers terminate a worker if an unexpected situation makes keeping them an "undue hardship" for the company. That's something one legal expert says doesn't make sense given the size of Coca-Cola Bottling.

In a statement to Go Public, the company pointed to the rare legal doctrine it used to terminate Hopkins, one that labour experts say many workers have likely never heard about. It's known as "frustration of employment," sometimes called "frustration of contract."  

It lets employers terminate a worker if an unexpected situation makes keeping them employed an "undue hardship" for the company.

But labour and human rights lawyer Suzanne Solsona says that legal argument is difficult for employers to prove, especially with a company the size of Coca-Cola Bottling.

"There's a real high bar on employers when it comes to frustration," she said. 

On its website, Coca-Cola Canada Bottling Limited describes itself as a "Proudly independent and family-owned" distributor of Coca-Cola products. It operates separately from the Coca-Cola Company. 

It employs over 6,000 people nationwide. In January, it opened a $75-million state-of-the-art, AI-enabled facility in Calgary next to the building where Hopkins worked for decades.

In the past two years, Hopkins has undergone multiple surgeries to try to repair the damage.