He said he heard the woman telling the man to \u201cleave me alone, stop touching me\u201d when he decided to intervene. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s in the corner and he\u2019s like pulling on her bag or her arm,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo I just sort of go over and say, \u2018excuse me sir, you need to stop\u2019. And he just fully changes all his aggression towards me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hohaia said the man came right up to his face in a threatening manner before attempting to headbutt him, leading to a physical struggle. <\/p>\n
\u201cI just automatically started firing back at him,\u201d he said. \u201cIt all happened very fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man tried to tackle Hohaia when he decided to apply a \u201cjiu jitsu technique\u201d to try to restrain the man. <\/p>\n
Despite his fellow employees arriving on the scene and telling them to stop fighting, Hohaia said he felt unsafe to disengage out of fear for himself, his colleagues and the woman involved. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe was quite strong and it was to sort of chill him out a bit, to take control of the situation without having to punch him anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hohaia said he then \u201cpushed him out the door\u201d and told him to get out, followed him outside and recorded him on his phone, before returning to the store and getting back to work. <\/p>\n
He was fired on October 13.<\/p>\n
Commission: Aldi had \u2018valid reason\u2019 to sack Hohaia<\/p>\n
In her published decision on the unfair dismissal claim, Rogers said Hohaia had ignored Aldi\u2019s strict Customer Service Guideline on how to handle incidents with violent or aggressive customers. <\/p>\n
The policy, which was displayed on a poster in the staff room, stated: \u201cDO NOT stand in their way, argue with them, take photos or put yourself in danger\u201d.<\/p>\n
The commission was told Hohaia had been repeatedly trained on the rules, and he also accepted that he saw the poster regularly during cross-examination.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear from the CCTV footage submitted that Mr Hohaia engaged in conduct of this nature during the incident and Mr Hohaia does not dispute that his actions were accurately captured by CCTV,\u201d Rogers said in her decision.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe failure to comply with Aldi\u2019s policies and procedures led to the situation escalating to a point where Mr Hohaia became the aggressor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tamati Hohaia was fired last year by Aldi over a physical confrontation during a shift, with his unfair dismissal claim also getting thrown out by the Fair Work Commission. Photos \/ @maorieinstein, Getty Images<\/p>\n
Rogers said Hohaia\u2019s actions constituted \u201cserious misconduct\u201d and found that Aldi had a \u201cvalid reason\u201d for his dismissal. <\/p>\n
Hohaia told the Herald he disputes that he breached Aldi\u2019s policies because the man wasn\u2019t a customer but an \u201cintruder\u201d who entered through the exit. <\/p>\n
\u201cAldi\u2019s policy is based off customer interactions, aggressive customers or shoplifters or people refusing bag checks. So that\u2019s the policy they keep referencing that I had breached. But he was an intruder, he was none of the above.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the cross-examination of Aldi\u2019s evidence, Hohaia said he asked a company representative if employees were trained on how to deal with violent people that aren\u2019t customers, to which the reply was \u201cno\u201d. <\/p>\n
Hohaia said he had a clean employment record for four years, including being promoted several times. <\/p>\n
He had \u201cstepped down to store assistant\u201d and reduced his contracted hours to focus on his social media. <\/p>\n
\u2018Off limits to strongarm a woman\u2019<\/p>\n
Aside from acting in self-defence, Hohaia said he also intervened to protect the woman who was in \u201cdistress\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got five daughters and a wife. I grew up with my mother and my sister. <\/p>\n
\u201cI see it as off limits to in any way try and strongarm a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hohaia said a friend of the woman reached out to him to thank him for helping out, explaining that the woman had come into the store to get away from the man. <\/p>\n
He said he would \u201c100% do it again\u201d and doesn\u2019t feel guilty, but he does feel sympathy for the man. <\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t want to hurt him … that was never my intention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since the commission\u2019s decision, Hohaia has published multiple videos on social media about the whole situation that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views.<\/p>\n
He has now made peace with the decision and is instead using the ordeal to \u201cmake more content on it\u201d, with his offer for an NDA declined. <\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t bite my tongue too much,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty crazy story that I can talk about and content that people like and it\u2019s content that does well.\u201d<\/p>\n
He has received almost universal support on his videos.<\/p>\n
Under his M\u0101ori Einstein handle, Hohaia posts about food, cooking and his life, with his videos gaining millions of views across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. <\/p>\n
Aldi and South Australia Police declined to comment when contacted by the Herald.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He said he heard the woman telling the man to \u201cleave me alone, stop touching me\u201d when he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[74,46051,58454,85,17517,1040,1656,30548,14086,26663,42,245302,671,359,123078,3112,809,194,685,11517,5836,2720,43,29374,2849,30308,312,120024,58932,97,134129,61,40,38,41,39,102,1354,379],"class_list":["post-489121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-after","tag-aldi","tag-altercation","tag-australia","tag-because","tag-bid","tag-company","tag-distress","tag-einstein","tag-fired","tag-headlines","tag-hohaia","tag-incident","tag-internet","tag-intruder","tag-job","tag-keep","tag-kiwi","tag-last","tag-loses","tag-lost","tag-mori","tag-news","tag-personality","tag-physical","tag-protect","tag-says","tag-scuffle","tag-selfdefence","tag-supermarket","tag-tamati","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-with","tag-woman","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}