It's not about throwing someone undeserving under a bus. This is about the shared responsibility of shared blame. The simple truth is that John has very little to do with the day to day activities at Boscos. Part of his success is that he DOESN'T micromanage around his general store managers who are both long time employees that have the responsibility of hiring, training, and firing every employee at their store. John does not set the employee's schedules either or assign work duties like taking out the daily trash, those are things the GM does. John probably had no idea an underage employee was using a trash compactor because it was Marc's paid responsibility to have read the law and properly trained each of his employees. Marc is a very smart man and he should have put the study time in to knowing what his underage employees were and were not allowed to do. Instead he messed up and John had to pay.