Woman Sees Husband Off to Iraq, Gets Fired

AP ^ | 10/26/5

[ebersole]

LOL!!! And I'm sure they never considered how their work was going to get covered, and it was all management's fault (sarcasm off).
I did have an employee who wasn't able to make it into the evening shift (during the summer) because the black plastic bags covering her windows at home had allowed too much sunlight into her home, and she had been overexposed. Oh and her goggles of some sort were lost (you know the ones that block all ultraviolet rays)..."You know those aren't really clouds and sunlight, they are poisonous gas put there by the government to kill us."
And no, I am not joking!!!

[AlaninSA]

I'm sure you have the "X-File" type employees everywhere. No matter what we in management do, there's always a big catch for them.

I have lost track of the number of Evil Management Plots that I've been told are in the works. You know - I think my X-File Employees are onto me. I actually do spend hours each day in meetings plotting the destruction of the hourly worker.

[ebersole]

Agree (too many files to count). Oh and don't forget the number of hours at home, whether awake or in our sleep, we spend thinking of ways to make their work and home lives miserable

[InvisibleChurch]

He added that other factors were involved in the decision,

And i'll bet there is no paper trail either, or i guess there is now

[Gondring]

She told her bosses that she would try to return that day but if she could not, she would definitely be back Oct. 18, she said.

Then...

"If I had even an inkling that I would be fired for not coming in Monday, I would have been there," she said.

BUSTED!

She said she'd return if she could, but then later has admitted that she could have returned, but chose not to.

[World'sGoneInsane]

There's a possibility that she took the week off and then tried to call out sick for the extra day. That's an absolute no-no for a lot of companies.

That's true...BUT...Did they have to call her up and leave a message to pick her things up? If there were other issues, they should have handled those at the time. You don't wait until her spouse is deployed and use that absense (time frame) as the excuse for whatever other reasons they had. If they were waiting for an excuse to fire her, they picked a bad one. Any bad publicity they earn on this one, they deserve.

[Ciexyz]

We don't know the whole story, but my sympathy lies with the fired employee. I hope she gets a good lawyer and gets her job back. Give her another chance, I say.

[IDontLikeToPayTaxes]

As a glorified babysitter, er, supervisor at a major corporation, it's my experience that simply getting people to come to work every day, on time, and work their entire shift without leaving early is like moving mountains.

I fire on average one person/month for their pathetic attendance; and I'm a VERY lenient manager. I fired a lady at the beginning of this month who stayed out of work for 6 weeks for a death in the family. She requested, and got, a week off work for the funeral and any arrangements. After that, she called in sick every day for a month. As a matter of fact, I fired a guy today (for sexual harrassment) and I'm working on firing 2 others. One of them just got hired last month. He's called in sick 5 times in October - two of those days were today and yesterday.

If I'm reading this story right, this lady probably had the same pattern. No company is going to go through the hassle (and it IS a hassle) of firing a good employee just to spend money and time recruiting, hiring and training a new employee. People that come to work daily and do their job without endless issues and complaining are worth their weight in gold.

[newfarm4000n]

We don't know the whole story, but my sympathy lies with the fired employee. I hope she gets a good lawyer and gets her job back. Give her another chance, I say.

I find it pathetic that people hide behind the troops to achieve their aims. I mean the issue here is whether she turned up to work or weather she didn't .I say this with great respect for our boys in Iraq but being the wife of a serviceman doesn't get you special treatment over other employees. I mean its people like her that make it darn near impossible to reduce the unemployment figures. If everyone who gets fired sues..well eventually employers will simply move overseas.

[TCats]

"I would have told the manager to wait until the next infraction and then lower the boom."

I strongly suspect this WAS the 'Next infraction'. We really don't know anything about what preceded this but I would think if she was doing well at her job this would not have happened.

What I do find surprising is the knee jerk condemnation by many here of the employer because this one-sided presentation of facts involves the War and our troops. There is more to this than meets the eye IMO and I strongly suspect this woman is not the innocent victim she portrays herself to be.

[IDontLikeToPayTaxes]

Where I work, it's policy that a person be employed there for an entire year before a Leave of Absense is approved. The key word there is "approved." An employee can apply for LOA, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be approved. This lady was gone from work for, what, 6 or 7 days? Anything over 5 days is considered a leave of absense at my company. So basically, she took 5 approved days off (as a part time employee), then called in to work to request more time off. That addditional time off after the 5th day is a LOA, which absolutely does not have to be approved.

This is the opinion of a guy that works his butt off every day and has been fired before, I'm certainly no cheerleader for big companies abusing their employees.

[caseinpoint]

I'm in agreement that there is much more than meets the eye on this case. I just think that if she were the poor employee I suspect she was, another infraction probably wouldn't have been far ahead.

In our office last June we had a fulltime legal secretary who suddenly disappeared, just didn't show up for work on a Friday and she was the sole person in the office from 8-9 am. By calling around to mutual acquaintances, we discovered that she had an argument with her grandmother, with whom she was living, and had hopped a plane cross-country to cry on her mother's shoulder. She finally called the office the following Tuesday. Of course it happened to be just a week before her scheduled vacation and so she ended up taking nearly three weeks off on an earned one-week vacation. They let her come back, not because she was a terrific employee but because they felt sorry for her. She stayed another six weeks and quit. I was glad to see her go. She wasn't suited for the job and had little or no sense of obligation to the company. It wasn't the first time she failed to show up without calling in. So I know about irresponsible employees and I have a lot of contempt for them.

I suspect this National Guard wife was of the same cloth but the timing of the firing handed her a club with which to bludgeon the employer so I still would have recommended waiting. And I agree that many on this site tend to leap to conclusions about "evil corporations". I know there are abuses on both sides.

[TCats]

"But the timing of the firing handed her a club"

Bingo. It is very likely she was a bad employee who the employer wanted to be rid of. The timing was terrible but it is also likely she knew she was on thin ice and goaded the employer into firing her at this sympathetic time so she could use the pretext she is shopping to the Media.

[Pittsburgher48]

What amazes me about this matter is how poorly the company handled it. This is a company that, among other services, consults on employee benefits. Therefore it is selling consulting services that relate to employee relations. For them to make such a boondoogle of it speaks poorly of the value of their consulting services.

It was bad enough that an executive chose poor timing to fire this woman. But then, when the CEO defended the decision by trashing the employee, he really dug a deep hole for the company. With this kind of poor judgment, what company in its right mind would buy their consulting services?

They've also got a substantial risk for what appears to be their main business, processing benefit claims. It's my understanding (and I hope anyone with more knowledge than I about that marketplace will correct me if I'm wrong) that such work is contracted for by intermediaries to the companies getting the services. In other words, a Chamber of Commerce might hire them to process claims for medical insurance it offers to its chamber members. If they get enough complaints from the chamber members about doing business with them, the chamber would likely go elsewhere for this service, or even do it in house. With companies that contract directly with them, say a decent sized manufacturing firm that has its own group insurance contract, the pressure would be even more direct, coming from grass roots level employees.

It just seems like Benefits Management Adm. acted with very poor judgment in this whole situation. It remains to be seen if they will dig themselves in even deeper by continuing to attack her publicly, attacking the media for not presenting "their side of the story", etc.

[NittanyLion]

Here's what I think:

1. The company was definitely within their rights to terminate her
2. She was probably an employee with a long track record of problems (i.e. this was the "last straw")
3. The company would've been better off waiting for another last straw than making themselves the target of this bad publicity

[pamlet]

Laugh.... Oh my - you're in SA? I was a supervisor for an Airline reservation center there about 10 years ago - and I had my share of those very weird excuses...

[SmithL]

Bingo!

[AlaninSA]

Yes - I'm in San Antonio. I absolutely love living here. Great weather, wonderful food and outstanding people (for the most part). It's the biggest small town in America.

Just a couple days ago, my battery died in my truck. I was at a gas station within walking distance of my workplace. I was going to walk back over to get a jump from a coworker, but had gone in to let the staff know I'd be leaving my truck parked next to the pump.

I no sooner had said that I was going to walk back to get a jump -- no less than five people offered to help me out. It's such a friendly place to live. It's very different than some of the other large cities I've lived in.