So, this happened a few years ago. Right around August of 2020 when COVID was really taking off.
I had worked w/ the company for 10yrs, starting very low & worked my way up to the executive management group. The company had a single Owner, who controlled everything. I had met my wife there & we had gotten married a few years later. She had been given a few promotions & had agreed to a 45hr work week, that included guaranteed overtime. She was doing that for about a year.
I got a call from a recruiter who had an opportunity that was too good to pass up. I played everything by the books, giving a full two weeks notice & taking the extra time to write manuals & clean-up documentation for many of the processes they had, which I was mainly responsible for. I went above & beyond here to try & make this transition as easy as possible for him.
One of the biggest things I was leaving behind, is over the last year I had taken the reigns on redesigning his software system. I had programmers working under me & we were going through some major changes to digitize all the manual processes he had going on. To try & help out, I offered to consult for him for 5 hours a week, so he could keep that going.
So, the Monday after I'm gone, my wife gets pulled into a meeting with her Manager & HR and they tell her that due to the affects of the pandemic on the business, they were going to have to take away her overtime & she would be back to 40hrs a week. They told her that the overtime was never guaranteed and that it was only given because it was available & no longer is.
My wife ended up telling them that she wasn't going to accept this and viewed it as a demotion & that she would consider herself terminated if they could no longer offer that position. HR went livid on her & told he she was quitting, they were not firing & really reaffirmed that the overtime had never been guaranteed as part of the position.
What HR didn't know, is that I knew this company plays games & when they gave her the position, I told her to have her Manager send her an email confirming the details, including the guaranteed overtime.
So it goes all week with my wife having stated her case on Monday, that she intended to work 45hrs & HR saying no. So on Friday around lunch time, my wife walks in w/ her things packed up & copies of the email printed out & gives one to HR to show her that she had it in writing & basically wanted to give them another chance to reconsider. The HR person I guess literally started yelling at my wife & starting grabbing for the emails copies in her hand, screaming at her that it was company property & that she couldn't take them. My wife ended up letting go of everything and leaving. We later remembered that she forwarded herself a copy of that email, when it was first sent, so we just reprinted it from there.
She ended up filling for unemployment & getting approved, which the employer contested, but lost the case. They appealed & lost that too, which they then filed another appeal that was sent up to an executive review & they lost that one too. In fact, that call was the quickest one for my wife. The executive team asked two questions: when did my wife start working 45hrs & how many weeks was she working it for? They didn't let anyone else speak, ended the call after those two questions & closed it in her favor.
This was at the time when the the gov. was giving that extra stipend for unemployment too, so she got to be more selective when picking her next job, which she absolutely loves.
tl;dr- Worked w/ my wife at a small office, that I had worked at for a decade. Gave my two weeks notice, offered to consult for 5hrs a week. Monday after I left, they reduced my wife's hours by 5. She quite, got unemployment & we're both so much happier now.