I work at a daycare center in NY state. Our manager thinks the NY state sick leave laws don't apply to us. Most of my coworkers are young, either in college or fresh out of high school so they don't know their rights and have a hard time sticking up for themselves. So they're easily taken advantage of. In the past when I showed my manager the sick leave laws, their only response was “thank God no one else knows about this.”
The most recent example of this is my coworker. I've been filling in this whole week as her assistant teacher. She hasn't been feeling the greatest and was told by my manager to go to Wellnow, an urgent care, after work on Wednesday. She went to Wellnow and tested positive for the flu. They gave her a note taking her out of work Thursday and Friday. The note showed her positive influenza results.
My manager denied her the right to call in sick. They forced her to come to work and told her they aren't accepting Wellnow notes and claimed the note wasn't detailed enough.
Before I arrived to work yesterday, they told her not to tell me because they “didn't want to hear me complain”. So she was told to keep her positive flu results a secret from me.
So many of my coworkers knew. And parents were notified via her classroom app. But I was the one to be left in the dark.
To make it worse, they know I care for a friend with stage 4 cancer that is severely immuno-compromised. I've been at this place 10 years, longer than anyone else. It's clear I'm not respected.
I've already been looking for another job before this happened and plan to get out ASAP but how would you handle this? I can't just quit.