When employers determine fitness — fireman fired for diet failure

Remember the 280-pound fireman who was fired last summer because his bosses said his weight made him “unfit” for duty? The world’s strongest and fittest Olympic athletes proved that weight is no measure of fitness, making it clear to the world what his firing was really about.

After a union fight, he was reinstated, but was told that to keep his job he had to lose some 50 pounds.

He dieted hard but, as everyone knows, diets don’t work. Even the obesity expert working with him said there was no way for him to reach the weight target within the time-scale his bosses demanded.

The Aberdeen Evening Express just reported that 35 minutes after a weigh-in this week, he was fired, just pounds away from the weight target set by his bosses.

An experienced fireman, who had served the community for twenty-two years, is now unemployed. To his bosses, his uniform size mattered more than experience.