I work for a company that works on social media for political clients (this company got in hot water 5 years ago for some racist/nationalist rhetoric and having an actual neo-nazi employed but I digress).
Anyway so far this year at least one person has been fired/quit each month and apparently the turnover rate used to be worse. In January one guy was fired because he made a mistake that ended with the client dropping us, in February another got fired because he spoke up about being treated unfairly 15 min after a meeting where the CEO stated that nobody is going to be fired for speaking their mind. In March one person lasted less than 24 hours before they quit. In April two people quit to a better job.
So after some vacant slots and an increased workload due to it being an election year, the creative director begged to be able to hire new people. He interviewed people in March and chose this guy who had experience in political campaigns but was vetoed by the CEO because he did not want to pay a relocation fee. CEO then chose a candidate almost at random and hired them. This new hire was originally from a South American country and was decent at english but sometimes he is hard to understand/follow. His designs were also not up to par with the rest. The CEO seems to want to fire him but keeps him as the sort who does intern errands.
This set the stage for this past Monday, where this new hire started (he is from another South American country). All went well until a morning meeting on Tuesday where the CEO was there. He asks each new hire for a fun fact about themselves, and the new hire was a bit flustured after his mic did not work, and so the CEO did not give him a chance to answer. Immediately afterwards there were talks about firing the new hire because he “didn’t know english”. This despite the fact that the hiring process/application form and his resume were all in English. Nevertheless the CEO made up his mind and decided to fire him for a simple mistake, but also partly due to the bad aftertaste of the past hire. This reeks of prejudice and it seems as though this is the tipping point for the Creative Director to quit amongst many other things wrong with this company.
The worst part is that the new hire quit his last job to work here only to be fired after 1 day for almost no reason at all. These kinds of petty decisions seem to follow the CEO who lacks empathy and treats his employees like indentured servants (he moved most of the office staff to another state, in an expensive city with terrible parking/traffic). He has also done some questionable stuff overseas but that’s a story for a different time.
TLDR: CEO fired new hire for “not knowing english”, which seems to be racially motivated because of a previous bad hire.