My girlfriend works at a hotel five days a week. She has only been at this job a month or two. She switched to it from another hotel job because they were horrible with keeping a schedule consistent. (First shift, then second, back to first, then third, etc.. what did they think was going to happen putting one person per shift during Covid, if one person is sick NOONE is there and there is no overlap…)
Anyways, there’s the huge snow storm coming (from recently). A day or two before she works during it I warn her she may be able to get home after her shift, but there is no way her 2 wheel drive is getting back to work the next day. My work was already pre cancelled and we never do that so you know it was going to be bad.
Anyways, she gets with her manager and checks if they would let her stay in a room for free so she can keep working and not have to call in. They said it was fine and let her do that. We made sure she had all the supplies she would need- chargers meds insulin things to eat etc. She was basically going to be stuck there 3 days.
The storm hits as predicted and she’s stuck at work and hardly anybody can get anywhere even in huge trucks. So she’s one of the few able to do her shift but I would say proved her foresight useful in being there. We got like 14 inches of snow and everything is shut down.
On one of the three days she was there she had a day off and wasn’t working but she was still trapped there.
Apparently later on her manager was super pissed off that she didn’t “volunteer” to work that day off as well even though she would have if they had asked and was literally 50 feet away. The manager bitched that she had to cover somebody and blah blah blah. I guess they didn’t plan ahead, and were too dumb to ask her as well.
The next schedule she’s only on the schedule for 2 days and was told someone wanted to make up hours for missing work from Covid before.
The schedule after that she’s not on the schedule at all when she called about it. She had to reach out to her manager and found out she basically doesn’t work there anymore. She asked why and all they would say is it was “time to go our separate ways”.
I don’t even know what that is. Laid off? Fired? We are in Illinois which is an at will state, and they can give any reason, and they may not have to specify to us but surely they have to specify to someone like unemployment? I mean if they over-hired and picked the other person, that’s fine, but at least communicate something.
I can’t believe they wouldn’t sit her down for a lay off, or say they don’t have the hours, or whatever. This feels like a “your fired, but we don’t want to tell you” kind of moment. There are 8 other jobs urgently hiring for the same position within 5 miles of us so it’s more the principle of this thats pissing me off rather than the need for this job. Do we need to get in writing her employment ending? Can they just take you off a schedule and pretend you don’t exist? I’m worried about if it’s ok for us to just put laid off on a resume and it turns out they “fired” her. This honestly came at a really bad time.
The only other thing they got pissed about is they wanted her to work an 11 hour shift with no warning and she said no (my girlfriend has myotonic muscular dystrophy which they know about and an 11 hour shift is really not possible unless she’s warned ahead of time). She told them about her reasonable job accommodations beforehand and longer shifts (over 8 hours) with a warning of a day or two was one of them.
I’m normally the type of person that if I have to choose between letting something go and devoting time and effort into something stupid, I will just let it go. But this is not sitting with me well at all and I think I will repay this act of stupidity anyway I can with at least some inconvenience. I don’t care if I need to call there corporate or hr, or her bosses boss, or social media, or ask a lawyer, but I am, in a professional capacity, PISSED.