The events following happened earlier this week. The company I worked for was a small business that sold various products online and fulfilled orders from a small store in the local area. Last week, the owner left town for a couple of weeks and decided to spring a new contract on us without warning. After carefully reviewing the contract, I opted not to sign because my current contract was open-ended and the benefits were a lot better. As you can imagine, the contract I was on wasn't great; my wages were below $20 an hour with no options for medical, dental, vision, retirement, or disability. It did include the wage and 10 days PTO with a severance package that gave me over a month's pay for involuntary termination, however.
All benefits except the wage were terminated by the new contract. The new contract also included clauses that eliminated the employee's right to fairly sue, while expanding the employer's right to sue for up to 4 years after any form of termination. They said the new contract would be required to work at the new warehouse, which we were expected to transfer to at the end of the week. I told them I was willing to negotiate a new contract, but couldn't sign one that limited my rights and benefits like the new one they proposed.
The work performed in the warehouse was pretty difficult; you're lifting and moving heavy packages by hand, sometimes entire stacks because the owners flat out refused to palletize their products. All of this was done in a warehouse without air conditioning, which is absolutely miserable in the tropics. On top of that, the place was absolutely full of OSHA and DOL violations, like live wires hanging close to metal racks, stacks of products over 6 feet high that would frequently fall on their own, and heavy items on shelves 15 feet in the air that either had to be dropped or carried down a ladder by hand.
The day after I refused to sign, I had to take a day off for personal reasons unrelated to work. The following day, I showed up to the old warehouse to work for the day but no one showed up. After about 20 minutes, the operations manager texted me and told me to take the day off and return to the old warehouse the following Monday. They transferred operations to the new place during my day off and didn't notify me. I found this a bit strange, but I did as instructed.
The following Monday is when everything started. The CEO was out of town and his father was overseeing operations. The morning hours were fairly uneventful, except for a couple of times the older man tried to tell me to calm down when i didn't have any kind of attitude or raised voice at all. This made me suspect something was up. After i finished fulfilling my assigned orders, he told me to go to the back and separate damaged from sellable products in a stack that had been sitting for a long time and to throw away any damaged ones. I had personally consulted him on several items that i wasn't sure about, and did as he requested.
At exactly 12:57pm, 3 minutes before lunch time, he came to my area and said not to throw anything away until he looked at it, and that he had gone through the products in the cart that i intended to throw away and found them all sellable (including several that i had been told by him specifically to throw away). I began to pull the products off the cart, one by one, to show the damage. I showed him the first one, dropped it on the floor from about 3 feet high to get the next one (the products are not fragile at all and we all dropped them like this all the time). After dropping the mat, he exploded into an abusive tirade. I grabbed my belongings and told him we can talk about it after lunch, and this infuriated him even more. He chased me at the door shouting profanities and telling me not to come back, and if i did i would be arrested. I haven't been back since.
Just a couple of days later, i got a letter of termination through certified mail, claiming i was violent and abusive toward company staff and destroyed company property by throwing products away, and that i wasn't getting any severance. The letter also claims that i only came in that Monday to get my personal items and i would not be paid for the 5 hours i worked day. I intend to take them to court as soon as I'm able to find my copy of my contract.