Sorry if this is a rambling story.
I worked full-time for 3M. A few years into my employment with them I applied for a maintenance job, since I had 5 years of previous experience in maintenance. I was told I needed schooling, minimum of an Associates for the role so I went back to school. 3M allowed me to work straight nights instead of the Midnight, Afternoon, Days (MAD) rotation everyone else had so I could go to school during the day.
I did that for a year and a half, full time college and work, I wouldn't recommend. When I was in my last semester of college 3M changed their rules so you weren't allowed to leave the building during your shift, even on break, since people were going to their cars and smoking, (No smoking on campus). Also no leaving campus while at work. Which of course is outrageous even if you aren't a smoker and had everyone upset. People were even more upset than all the mandatory in-week and weekend overtime. The office people were salary and were allowed to go outside during their breaks and lunches to the designated break areas of leave the campus since they had unpaid break times.
So there were a few of us who reached out to a well known Union and met with them and started a little Union drive for our plant. Less than a week later we had multiple MANDATORY anti-union meetings where a 3M corporate HR person come down and regurgitated every anti-union lie imaginable. Unions will make long time employees lose their pensions, you'll lose your choice of healthcare, it will get x times more expensive, ect.
I called the HR lady out on all that non-sense and the next week I got called to the Plant Managers office, not the HR office. The Plant Supervisor and head of HR, I'll call her Dolores Umbridge, had me read the official Electronic Devices document, about no unofficial use of corporate computers or networks. I asked if I was being accused of breaking any of the rules of the document (which I hadn't). They assured me this was standard procedure to go over the documents with employees, which it wasn't, there were only 2 other people who were called to the office that day, both union supporters.
After the meeting, I emailed my boss, his boss, the plant super supervisor and Dolores Umbridge with notes from the meeting.
Dolores immediately responded by coming to my work area and saying all communication about the matter will be done via face-to-face to avoid any 'misinterpretation' from written communication(?), also known as no paper trail attempt.
Right after that I immediately emailed the same four people with my updated chat with HR.
When I came in the next week I was summoned to the Plant HR office, no the HR office again like the standard operating procedure is and was told by the Plant Manager and Dolores there was a complaint against me about my quality of work. I said my quality of work has never been questioned before. They said it should be completed in a few weeks. I emailed the usually suspects a summary of my chat again and also emailed my boss asking how I have been doing at work since he had been giving me exceptional ratings the last 2 years.
He said he's unable to talk with me about such things while being under investigation.
Then after that HR started showing up for the mandatory weekend OT to 'help out management during the weekend'. She pretty much just sat in the windowed office watching a few of us the whole shift and monitoring our lunch break times to the second.
By that time I only had a few weeks left of classes so I met with the Maintenance Lead for a maintenance tech spot. He said there weren't any spots available which sucked, so I applied at other companies while I waited. I had a bunch of responses and was telling my classmates that. They asked why I didn't take the job at 3M since I was already a full-time employee there. I told them there wasn't an open position to which they replied that two of them were offered jobs that week for the job I applied for.
I was obviously quite upset but at that point but I did have a job offer with the same pay and it WASN'T a rotating swing shift so I took that and put in my 2 weeks notice, for my co-workers sake.
Now 5 years later I saw some posting for both Lead and Engineer which I have mean all the requirements for. I applied for 4 different positions over the past 6 months and talked with recruiters each time. They seemed really excited that I had worked there in the past with a good work record and had 5 years of experience in the Controls field. But after each initial interview my application was closed within hours with no explanation, not even a canned emailed explanation.
I had tried getting back there since it's only a few minutes from my house.