So I worked at a private club as bartender for a year. It was a pretty bad gig for me because I had to drive (I only lived close for a couple weeks before I found a place 45 miles away) and the pay was 8.00/hr.
It was just a side job to help with bills, but I liked all the elderly patrons for the most part and no one else wanted to work there, so I stayed on and was generally well liked.
The club had troubles way before I ever started and sometimes my check would be a couple days late, but it was never a bank breaker.
Towards the end of my year tenure, however, the checks started to fall further and further behind, and I found myself owed a full month’s wages. That’s fucked and I shouldn’t have put up with it, but it’s really not that much money, and that’s not the part that bothers me.
The part that bothers me is when I asked the newly elected treasurer if she could look into my check, and that it was a month behind, she told me she’d take care of it.
Well she sure did, because the next day I was fired, no reasons given. I told them that I would come and have a satisfactory explanation, so I appeared for my shift and found the treasurer’s granddaughter had replaced me. This seemed rather nepotistic, but what really rankles is that I later found out that she had instructed the administrator to fire me on the grounds of “he has long hair, and is probably stealing.” Supposedly a recording also exists to that effect.
So even though they don’t need cause to terminate me in a right to work state, this still seems exceedingly fucked up to me. Can I do anything? Even if it’s just suing her for defamation since she said that and it affected my livelihood?