This is gonna be a long post. I guess for some backstory I live with my mom she has two auto immune disorders and has to take a medication that lowers her ability to fight infections. I myself have pretty severe asthma and anemia, and I mean severe asthma as in, I spent the first couple years of my life in an oxygen tent (at least according to my mother, I remember none of this) I could use a fucking nebulizer by myself by the time I was four. That knowledge is ingrained in me at this point of my life (in my mid 20s)
Back in October I started a job that was having us work from home but attempting to move us in to Office after training, and I was fine with this at first. Training was a month long PAID class. This is sad, but before this I was a store manager of a million dollar retail store commonly located in malls (as in my store had made it onto the Million Dollar Store list), and yet somehow this new job still pays better and it’s only $18 an hour. Love having weekends off for the first time since I was 16.
Half way through the first week I got the flu, took my z-pack, thought everything was good. Third week of training i’m having a severe coughing fit and end up passing out. Get taken to the hospital. I thought I had gotten over the flu and was just experiencing allergies, I was not. I had never gotten well and it turned into viral pneumonia. I’m just too used to not being able to breathe correctly, so I didn’t really notice it until that point. And there began the issue. Send work the hospital paperwork, I only ended up missing three days total of training and was able to work through it all despite the fact that I should’ve been in a hospital bed and wasn’t because the hospital was claiming they were full.
After training was over they moved everyone into office but I had to fill out a reasonable accommodation form that would allow me to postpone my return to office, and I was only able to do this because I had a note from my doctor stating I needed to work from home, I believe until the end of November if I remember correctly, to make sure I was fully recovered from the pneumonia. So I return to office and am barely in the office for a month before there’s a companywide Covid outbreak. By the way my company was making vaccinations mandatory so everyone who works there is fully vaccinated. So we end up working from home again for a month. And then we’re back in office in February.
Well it’s March now and on February 28 i was in an urgent care facility getting x-rayed because guess what! Not even five months later and I have pneumonia again. Except this time all the coughing made me lose my voice so I couldn’t even take calls from home, and ended up missing four days total!
And here’s where the bullshit starts because come to find out, why yes! the company does have sick time! 62 hours! The catch? you can only use it if you have that amount of PTO. (so if you can read between the lines of that, that means essentially your sick time is your PTO)
And if you miss a day when you’re out of PTO then that’s a point against you regardless of the reason. Hell one of my coworkers got into a car accident and came to work with an actual concussion.
They have this weird ass attendance point system where being late counts against you as well but they haven’t explained it to anyone clearly so no one can actually keep track of their own points, which I’m pretty sure is intentional. I only had enough for a day so that’s three more points against me despite being one of the top agents in my department and the fact that I should be in a hospital rn, so essentially I’m fucked.
What I really want to know is this. if they fire me, is there anything I can do against them? Would they even be able to fire me legally when I provided them literal copies of my x-rays showing I have pneumonia? I’m actually still working from home right now due to it, mainly because I can’t afford to miss work and again am out of PTO, but if I get worse again I’m not gonna be able to work. And if I end up hospitalized again? I just don’t know what to do at this point because I’m having to fight to get to work from home because I’m pretty sure one of the big guys in charge is one of those types of people who believe Covid doesn’t really exist. I also find it ridiculous that I’m having to work in this condition at all but there’s nothing I can really do that I know of.