Little background, I work for a local government as a first responder. On Christmas they hired a food truck to make Christmas meals for all the field staff.
They worked with logistics to get the meals out to all field staff members. That night about 40% of field staff notified admin of severe nausea/vomiting and stomach cramps. Many called off the next day. An investigation was performed by the department and found that the pork in the meals decimated was bad and concluded that the symptoms were caused by food poisoning from said meals.
The people that called off had to used their own PTO including me who was anchored to the bathroom for about 5-6 hours. I only had 2.22 hours of PTO available so I lost a significant amount of income by calling off from food poisoning.
I haven’t contacted HR yet but have confirmed that they used employees PTO bank for call offs and employees lost wages if they didn’t have the PTO available.
They also mandated vaccinations and if any employees. If there were call offs the day after the dose due to illness then their personal PTO was used.
My question, do we as field staff members have any grounds to stand on to have our PTO reimbursed and our loss of wages back paid? Seems only right since the direct cause was from the departments decision on food supply.
This is a municipal organization.
edit fixed some typos