So up until yesterday, I was the AGM for a popular trampoline/adventure park. My GM and I ran the building and we did it pretty well- we exceeded goals, we built up our staff team and everyone including us was excited to work every day. We switched from corporate ownership to franchisee ownership in February, and the owner was a delight to work for. He signed us on with solid salary contracts, and last month I was pulled aside for him to tell me that my hard work and commitment had not gone unnoticed, and that he’d met with the board of other investors and they’d agreed to remove my probationary period and fast tracked my pay raise by a month. He then made some comments along the lines of “not a slight to your GM, but when I need something done I know I can come to you, etc.” Now being close friends with my GM, I obviously brought this up and we agreed that the owner was not-so-subtly testing the waters to see if I would step on his shoulders to take his spot. The owner had begun bullying my GM, being rude and short and nitpicking and micromanaging him for everything, deliberately ignoring the results and the fruits of our hard work- I saw it firsthand as I was CC’d on many of the emails. Not too long after that I was very suddenly included in this. It quickly turned to borderline verbal abuse, emails filled with words in ALL CAPS to express the EXTREME levels of juvenile, tantrum-level anger the owner was experiencing out of nowhere. In the last month he’d forced us to slash payroll, cut hours and when we tried to reason with him on concerns of needing a minimum amount of staff to safely run the park attractions, he’d fire back with comments like “this isn’t a charity, I don’t HAVE to give ANYONE hours just because they WANT them.” It took two weeks to lose half a dozen staff members, and more were threatening to follow. It became clear that he was trying to bully anyone he could into just quitting, and when it didn’t work, myself, my GM, and my park lead below me all received phone calls from HR informing us we were all terminated. We were told that we’d get emails with our “disciplinary actions” in writing along with the details of our severance packages within the next hour- it’s about to be day two with no contact whatsoever. The most interesting thing is that not one of us has ever signed or even been threatened with a write up or any sort of documented corrective action. Our franchisee owner has essentially ghosted us, locked us out of all of our systems, accounts and software and he’s refused to make any sort of contact with us at all. We just found out from our staff today that he’d already hired AND trained a new manager long before he had some poor woman in another state call us each to fire us because he’s too afraid to actually speak to any of us now. My park lead and my GM both have families and children to care for and we’re all just being hung out to dry without even the courtesy of a conversation about it.