Last week, my trainer asked me if I heard about White Castle being sued for collecting biometric scans without employee consent because we had installed a finger scanner a few months before I started in December. I told her that I hadn’t, but I had questioned the legality because I was aware of the law after collecting a settlement from a similar CA lawsuit against Facebook.
After asking my trainer to review my onboarding materials so see if biometrics were mentioned anywhere (they weren’t), I forwarded the article along with the actual text of the Illinois Biometric Act to some corporate-based HR team members as well as our President and VP. Their reply was quick and was a complete blow-off. I followed up and urged them to take a second look as it is very clear that we were not compliant with the law. I received a personal reply from the President of the company promising to take a second look and make sure we were compliant.
I didn’t hear anything else about it, and put it out of mind. Today, my plant manager called me into his office and told me they were terminating me, 2 days before my 90 day probationary period ended, because corporate decided that I wasn’t a good “culture fit”. He vaguely mentioned some e-mails that corporate thought were inappropriate, but he couldn’t give me any specifics and admitted that he never saw any of the alleged e-mails. I was unaware of any issues, either from corporate or our local plant. This was never even mentioned to me, formally or informally. He told me that he was happy with my performance and that this was purely a corporate decision.
Am I wrong in believing that this had something to do with my e-mails regarding biometric collection? Should I contact a lawyer? Do I have a leg to stand on?