Prefacing this by saying sorry if this gets super long.
(I'm also on mobile, sorry for that too)
I work for a coffee company in the US and I think I have every reason to believe that I am facing serious discrimination and retaliation. For the past seven to eight months my boss (and the temporary manager) has made my life a living hell and has been escalating things to the point where I've broken down because of how miserable I am there. I would find another job but I want to use their school benefit for as long as I can till I get my degree. If I quit now, I'll immediately lose that benefit.
Because of my disability, my boss absolutely hates me and makes his ableism very apparent. I have trouble walking and chronic health issues and I stated this within the interview. I didn't elaborate much, but I did make it known I have health issues I need to get surgery for.
He made remarks about my disability at first. He discussed my disability with coworkers and customers. He assumes I'm the one to call off when other shift supervisors report someone had called off and he asks them immediately if I was the one who had called off. He had even lied to them once saying I had no-call no-showed, despite the fact I had never done such a thing before. When confronted, he confirmed that it was because of a bias, but that he would “try to be better.”
He has lied to me repeatedly about my school benefit and had started shorting me on hours when I had set up my surgery with the department that is in charge of that sort of thing. Then he had cut my hours in half. When I spoke to him that the requirement was still 20 hours to receive that benefit, he said they had changed it and that there was no hour requirement. I asked my school and they said it had still been the same and that I am at risk of losing that benefit if I don't have enough hours.
He had claimed my weird work schedule was because of the fact that he was confused about the times for the surgeries I had even though I had given that information to him in writing. Then, once I had a pre-op appointment that I was very clear I needed that just one day off for, he proceeded to say he understood and I would have that day off. Then I wasn't put on the schedule for a month and it never got fixed while he himself went on a leave of absence.
I had to scrounge around and embarrassingly beg for shifts to pick up for over a month because my schedule was never fixed. The temporary manager that was filling in while he was gone had said that he couldn't fix it. Then after my leave for my surgery, I had immediately gotten written up by that temporary manager for “dress code” reasons the first day I was back, while the temporary manager was out of dress code during the write up. I never had any verbal warnings for anything we had discussed and told me to find new clothes, but I can't because I am so financially ruined from the forced month off where I wasn't scheduled. That temporary manager had known about that situation too. The money I had gotten from my leave had to go to rent, bills, and food. But when I told them this, he just said that he'd give me a timeframe to find new clothes.
I had been working normal hours since my leave because thankfully my actual manager didn't write the schedule. But when I had come in to work one day and the actual store manager was there, he saw me limping around and not 5 minutes into my shift, he decides to send me home. He sees me limp around the store a lot while I work because I have trouble walking, but that day he “couldn't bear to see me in pain” and sent me home. While I had to wait for my partner to pick me up, I sat around for two hours trying to figure out how to get accommodations officially set up. I had told him that I had been trying to set up accommodations for a while and that I already had a note to my doctor to give to him so he could help with that process because I didn't know where to go from there since I had never really been told how. He said that instead I should set it up myself in case the people that set up my accommodations need “copies” or “photos” of the doctor's note. I accepted that I could do it myself if he gave me the information to do so, but he brushed me off and went to help my coworkers and left me alone. Two days after when I saw him again, I told him I submitted something to a website that looked right but I was unsure. He said it had been the right one I found and helped him out, giving him “one less thing for [him] to do.”
I've already reported this behavior and more to HR and the EEOC (I have a meeting with them in August), and my doctor is currently trying to see if there is a medical-legal team that would be able to help me since I have no money and don't know where to start looking for a lawyer that would work pro-bono other than the medical-legal team (hopefully). This has been such a source of distress and I don't know what to do otherwise. How do I survive this? How can I keep going? I feel like I have to stay with this job since I'm still in school under their benefits. Sorry this is so long but I need somewhere to put this and someone to listen. I'm so overwhelmed and it feels as though there is a new development to this case every day.