I worked for Carvana HQ in Tempe AZ and I worked part time due to health reasons preventing me from working full time and I had be suffering from a very bad headache and went to sleep right when I got home and didnt wake up till 5PM that day. I had forgot to clock in that day but did my work and realized that I wasnt clocked it. No problem I though and I let my Team Lead (TL) know and he said he'll fix it. So when I wake up, I check Slack to see if there was any movement in that since I was told I would be contacted when that was done when I noticed that I was logged out. Not a big issue since you get logged out sometimes but I decided to check my personal email and that was when I noticed I had three emails from my TL at Carvana, with it saying I was no longer employed at Carvana.
Of course red flags were firing off in my head and I emailed my TL letting them know that I had just woken up from my nap (now 5PM) from my raging headache and to reach back out so we could setup another Zoom meeting to talk about the decision. My TL knew I had a bad headache and knew that I work five hours a day and I wasnt told that I would be having a Zoom meeting at 2:30PM that same day and since I dont check emails from work when Im not working, I didnt know one was setup for me with HR and a few other people and of course I missed it because I was sleep trying to nurse this headache.
I havent had any disciplinary actions taken against me or signed any written paperwork about such. I dont have attendance issues or ruffle feathers all too much and was told that my production was on point for the amount of hours I do work so you can imagine my surprise when I checked my email. I did a few days back get a verbal talking about things I have said on Slack and I know you may be thinking that was the reason for being fired but the things I asked aren't things that people consider being fired for. The two things I posted were “Carvana really doesnt like giving holidays off” and “what progress was being made on the GA Reassignment because they keep showing up with errors, which slows us down”.
At Carvana, we have work most major federal holidays (even the forth of July) and I took issue with that since I have never worked on that day before and apparently, that was no-no. My TL talked to me about that saying it was inappropriate to talk about such things, which took me by surprise because it wasnt. I said sure, I'll watch what I say next time and went back to work after we both joked for a bit. The next day we get a three minute video from the Registration manager talking about what days we do get off for holidays, which is pretty much only Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe New Years Days because I did work New Years Days this year with the video pretty much saying “ItS iN tHe EmPlOyEe HaNdBoOk” for the policy and that we should use these days to play catch up when the other venders are closed. I of course took issue with that and responded to the video, in which some co-workers PM me saying thank you for standing up to our right – the very next day after I said something about it.
With the next thing, I said the GA Reassignments (GARA for short) have been showing up incorrectly, taking more time to fill out because we have to fill them out right. We cant have write overs on any document, a decent policy to help prevent fraud so when we see it, we need to recreate the doc and these take time to remake because we have to write in the info. We have stamps to help with that but a lot of it we have to write in like VIN, addresses, customer names (which can be as long as 50 letters) and other tedious info. The Hub location has printers to print directly onto GARAs but they still send them out with errors, which we have to fix instead of them just printing a new one and filling it out correctly. We can do this but it requires another employee to stay at the printer and another at the computer so we can try to 'snipe' the print where we put the GARA in the printer tray to print directly on it and hope another print request wasnt sent because we dont have a printer to do this so I asked about what was being done to fix the issues we have with these docs because I noticed my production was dropping and was concerned and apparently this was a no-no as well and I was talked to about this in my one on one we have every two weeks – again, something I didnt think was wrong and both times it being work related. I expressed my concerns then and then talked briefly about wanting to start a union, something other co-workers expressed they themselves wanted to do but since Im the anti hero, I decided to do so because I really have nothing to lose.
The email I got says I was fired due to behavioral reasons, which obviously isnt true because I wasnt ever once talked to about this by and manager or HR and was never asked to sign anything saying we talked about it and this isnt one of those things where I was being edgy and said no, Im not signing it, I just wasnt presented with such so again, they came completely out of left field. Now, I knew talking about a union would get me fired but its against the law to do such and while AZ is a right to work state, you still need to give a valid reason and I would be hard pressed to find a court that convict me one any of the things I've said out side of greedy capitalist, so here I am now asking for help on how to proceed.
Sorry for the long wall of text but I needed to give context on such. The worse thing is I dont have any phone numbers of co workers so I cant even ask if they posted the 'anti union' video since they did one so quickly on what holidays we do get. After all, if you dont stand up for your right, you will lose them and they will make you look like the bad guy when you ask for them back and after the layoff of 2500 employees, tension has risen, which is why I expressed interest in unions because I know they wouldnt have us deal with things like working on federal holidays.