TL;DR at bottom
I work as a pizza delivery guy at a local restaurant. This happened about 3 weeks ago. Honestly pretty good timing, because I was about to move across my city to be closer to school.
It started on Tuesday. The whole shift had been extremely slow, even more so than a normal Tuesday. I had an assignment that I knew wouldn’t take that long, so when I got back from deliveries and I knew I didn’t have another one right away, I would pull out my phone and do the assignment in ~5 minute chunks and managed to knock it out by the end of the shift.
Every time I walked back in, all my co-workers were standing around or on their phones, see: extremely slow. None of them received the same punishment.
We close and I go home, everything is fine. I go back to work on Thursday with the same manager, normal shift.
Friday comes by and the manager (a different one than before) calls me into the office. As asked me if I had a bad day Tuesday, and I am visibly confused. He asks again and I’m still confused.
Now he tells me that the manager on Tuesday took 40 minutes off of my paycheck from Tuesday for sitting in my car too long after deliveries. They had only ever taken time off of a check for one other employee who was notoriously bad: chronic late and no-call no-show, lots of time in the bathroom during the rush.
A bit of context: I had been with them for 1 year and 10 months, and had been there for multiple month-long periods where I was one of 2 drivers employed. I had recently became frustrated because I had been asking for a raise for months. I had only gotten 1 in my whole time there and I had to ask for it. My pay only went up by 75¢ in the time I worked there. Suffice it to say I was one of the most hardworking and loyal employees, and I wasn’t getting anything more than the lazy portion of my coworkers.
My shift ends on Friday and I text the owner (who made the decision with tuesdays manager to take away my money). I tell him that I don’t feel like they appreciate me and that I feel like we could’ve handled it better, and it should’ve been taken care of that night.
He says he will take that as my resignation. I tell him he misunderstood. I say I don’t feel like he wants me there (he sent a text to his nephew, the only other driver, that he “sees my days as numbered”) and that if that is true then he should fire me and not treat me like I’m a bad employee when in reality, im one of the most loyal and hardworking.
He told me that I had just worked my last shift.
TLDR: My boss took money off of my paycheck for doing homework while it was slow and didn’t bother telling me. I asked them to communicate if they were going to do that in the future, and instead they fired me.