Long story, sorry
So many years ago i was working in an office job. The job started out fine, typical call center stuff nothing amazing, but it paid decent and i just had my 1st child and this had a stable 6am-2pm M-F so i was there literally for that.I was good at my job i handled everything i needed to, got good marks on my Quality assurance's and had about 5 reviews on me (all over 95%) before our GM was replaced.Now this new guy was an absolute fucking waste of space, showed up late all the time, barely available for questions, didn't know the industry at all…etc.
Now about this time he decided to put out a memo stating when we were away from our desks for any reason we had to use “away from desk status” from our call monitor system (so no calls would route to us) fine, i get that that was not a big deal, but the issue was the bathroom. If we needed to use the bathroom, we had to ask permission. This felt super unnecessary as if we were in our away from desk status, why would we need to ask permission. After several emails and memos about the subject he came down with a new policy.
“no bathroom breaks unless its in emergency” per the email we should plan our bathroom breaks around our normal break/lunch schedule. My question to him was”If its truly an emergency i don't think i will have time to wait for approval to use the bathroom, and what if I'm told no? do you expect me to shit in the trashcan?”
Several months of back and forth from me and management ended up with me investigating the company's policy's, and looking up OSHA guidelines on my computer as i felt this was not safe for the employees to be unable to use the bathroom. Fast forward a few weeks and i was fired for “using the internet on non work related sites” I asked “what sites?” they had mentioned on the termination report that i was visiting the OSHA website and that was grounds for termination.
So i then reached out to osha, claiming i was wrongfully terminated for investigating the unsafe working conditions i was working in, with the exposed cables from the ceiling in some places, water leaks, and the heavy restriction on bathroom to the point several employees were scared to even use the bathroom.
The took my case and opened up an investigative line with the company. Now unknown to my company, i knew i was going to get fired, i could see it coming so in the weeks leading up to it, i had backed up my emails from the boss, my performance reviews and any other data i was legally allowed to, cause i knew i would be escorted out once they fired me and wouldn't have access to my files anymore.
The companies counter claim, was that i was a disgruntled employee, and i was terminated for “poor job performance” and when OSHA emailed me back there was a 40 page document outlining dates/examples of this. I spent about a solid week going through every item, and writing my counter claim to it, most of it with hard evidence from my paper work. They would claim i barely worked on several days , but i had my call interaction log that showed me having 40% more calls/cases resolved than most. They would claim poor performance, i would show my several performance reviews where i score 95%…etc. I sent this back to OSHA and waited. About a week later i get an email saying they were going to do an internal investigation of the company, and they will let me know what happens.
2 days later i get another email, my company was willing settle outside of court if i drop the case, now i have been out of work about 3 months at this point, debt was stacking up. There offer $750. I said no, a few days later they came with another offer, $1400. I said no, i think i got about 6 increasing “offers” to settle before i finally accepted, the amount i accepted was roughly 15 grand. The only reason i accepted is cause as i said, new born +jobless+lots of debt. ironically i got a job offer the next week.
TLDR: company fired me for investigating their multiple safety violations through osha, i sued them and won
Quick edit: after everything settled down i also reported the boss to the company owner and got him fired for causing this entire problem, he then went to work for another company (i checked his linkdin) and only lasted about 3 months there