My wife has worked with this company for 7 years. It's a medium sized company that started locally in our area, and has since branched out to a handful of other states. She is the manager for her shop.
My wife has been working at this location the whole time she's been employed by this company. This is the location she chose to apply to, and the location she was hired to work at.
Now, the company has decided to “rotate” all of the managers in our area. Meaning, every manager within the company is being moved to a new location. This decision was made because they want to give the shop managers a challenge in order to “strengthen management skill
At least two thirds of the managers are very upset about this, including my wife. Almost all them specifically chose to live in the area that they work in of course, and base a lot of other life choices around location.
For us, we specifically rent a home that is 10 minutes away from my wife's current shop. We chose our 1 year old daughters daycare to be 5 minutes from the shop to make drop off easier. Mostly every part of our daily life is in this town.
They're moving my wife to a shop 20 minutes away from her current shop. Most of the other managers are being moved to a shop further from their home, too. This means instead of dropping our daughter off at daycare on the way to work and picking her up afterwards, my wife will have to drop her off, then drive 25 minutes to work, then 25 minutes back to pick her up after work. This adds nearly an hour of additional commute per day. That's nearly 5.5 hours of extra driving per week, and almost 24 hours of driving per month. When we already based our life in this area to avoid the commute.
Is there anything we can do about this? Is this really legal? If most of the managers are unhappy, can they get together to stop this from happening?