Sounds like an FMLA violation. Did you specifically say you would be taking leave? Not already on a "performance improvement" plan of any sort? Was anyone else let go on Friday?
I don't know how hard this sort of thing is to litigate, "at will" employment covers a lot of abuses, and honestly why would you want to stay at an employer who treats you like this? Probably best to spend your energy finding a new job.
Edit to add: You could report this to the Department of Labor. Not sure you'd personally get any restitution but if your employer was willing to do this kind of thing, you are probably not the only one they have screwed over. If an employer has a record of complaints they might get audited which could cost them a lot in penalties if they are violating the law.
FMLA only covers companies with 50 or more employees.
A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.
> I don't know how hard this sort of thing is to litigate, "at will" employment covers a lot of abuses, and honestly why would you want to stay at an employer who treats you like this? Probably best to spend your energy finding a new job.
It's not very hard to imagine why someone who is expecting a new child would want to continue to receive a paycheck and health insurance.
At least it has gone to court, and she has won at this point. It's not clear to me whether Magda gets paid for the time between her dismissal and her job being reinstated.
I'll continue to boycott Amazon. Earlier in the week I spent about an hour sleuthing the web to find an obscure item that wasn't from Amazon or China, finally found it at a local supplier.
> I announced to HR that my wife is expecting (Tue) and was fired on Friday.
Did you expect this might happen, maybe the baby is due very soon?
I discovered recently that some ebay sellers dropship via amazon. Unfortunately I don't think you can tell until you get tracking info, when it's too late to cancel - they are tracked via 'aquiline' which just seem to operate some server api that wraps amazon tracking numbers into ebay tracking numbers, and the delivery is from Amazon. But the actual product page just says 'other 24-hour courier'
I can’t speak to this case, but generally low wage workers are paycheck to paycheck and so get jobs while they wait for the system to do their thing. They only get paid for loss of income, so it actually subtracts what they earned in that time and so by working in the meantime the damages paid are much smaller. There are no punitive damages or anything.
Just to clarify: was "fired without cause" (worked "at will" which most of full-time employments are in the US). By asking why they were getting rid of me I heard the pharse "for no good reason, really" like a broken record. This was enough indication that it was clearly in regards to my talk with HR a few days prior.
Also, during my announcement to HR about my wife's circumstances, I remarked I wanted to take some time off to be there for wifey & baby.
The company was 90% lawyers so just in case I wanted to proceed legal action against them, their Armada of lawyers made a possible follow-up rather unsavory.
> their Armada of lawyers made a possible follow-up rather unsavory
Understood, but you should also know that EPLI deductibles are often in the mid-to-high five figures usually, which is an incentive for the employer to settle for anything less than that deductible.
Point being, if you get a lawyer, threaten to make a stink etc and are generally showing you're serious about fighting this abuse, settlement to the tune of 20-70k is a reasonable expectation. IANAL etc
Sadly, and I say this with all the love for my Polish brethren and sisters, Poland and many Eastern European countries still have some catching up to do.
The silver lining, however, is that these countries make significant headway at a steady pace.
Especially the countries that are part of the EU are constantly improving, partly because they have to adhere to the EU-wide minimum baseline.
So I've got faith they'll get there.
But this lagging behind, for lack of a better world, is also, in part, why many US companies that want to expand into the EU set up bases in countries like Poland.
It's generally cheaper and is the “least bad” from the corporations’ perspective regarding labor rights.
Do you have a source describing how common retaliation is in the US? I always thought it was actually pretty rare.
Sorry you lost your job, but I find it difficult to believe that it is solely due to you announcing the arrival of your child. Paternity leave is rarely more than 2 weeks in the US, I can't imagine a company preferring to deal with potential law suit instead of just living 2 weeks without an employee.
I expect most retaliation goes unreported, so going to be difficult to get any numbers that are not full of assumptions. Even if you know someone fired you for X, going to be hard to prove it: time, money, conflicting accounts, potential reputational damage for suing employer.
In the US too you get paternity leave, it's very fishy to see someone claim they got fired for announcing that their partner is expecting. This is a massive liability.
Presumably because he wanted to take paternaty leave after his child was born. Also why wouldn’t you tell coworkers you’re having a baby? It’d be really weird to keep that a secret.
Why wouldn't you communicate ahead of time that you're going to be taking a chunk of time off in the near future, specifically for something so important?
To earthwalker99: You got downvoted to death because you called out downvotes against you, but to explain more issues with your argument: Capitalism is a system of organizing society based on private ownership of the means of economic production. You're saying capitalism is about prioritizing the rights to capital accumulation by the current holders of capital, which is one specific form of capitalism, often called crony capitalism.
Private ownership of the means of production is more orthogonal to workers rights. There are capitalist economics in countries with very strong workers rights and unions, but where the means of production are still privately owned. Capitalism is fully compatible with strong family and medical leave protections, even though those who own the means of production are disincentived in the short term from giving workers rights. The fact that the US is worse on workers rights isn't a problem unique to capitalism.
So called "right to work" laws that actually give employers the right to fire for no cause. As long as an employer doesn't say what the cause was, employers in those states can fire you for "no cause" even if the hidden reason would be an illegal cause if they stated it. It's only illegal if someone gets caught specifically saying the firing was because the employee is having a kid. Coincidences are not considered admissable evidence in those courts.
Retaliation is abundant in the US. What are you smoking?
If a company thinks it can get away with it, it will. Saving money is more important than a hypothetical, minuscule and temporary hit to their reputation. There will always be consumers looking for a bargain at any real cost, workers desperate for a pay check, and shareholders worshipping the bottom line.
This is the tech bubble talking. Most big tech companies do treat their tech workers well...warehouse workers, not so much.
But for every big tech company there are thousands of smaller non-tech companies, where they do not treat employees well. Also common != majority.
Just read up on how Walmart treats their employees, for example. I just read an article earlier this week about Walmart systematically under-reporting OHSA violations, and retaliating against employees reporting workplace accidents to OHSA.
IDK if it's very common but it happens, especially at smaller companies who either don't know the rules or those who have gotten away with it in the past and think they are too small to get noticed.
Just recently here a restaurant was fined for not paying overtime by employing dishwashers and kitchen staff as "salaried" exempt employees.
At large companies with in-house legal and HR teams? It probably doesn't happen much, but even there they will know what they can get away with.
Its not "retaliation" as such, just that for many unskilled jobs having someone show up everyday is the main part of the job. If you want time off they can swap you for someone who'll be there.
I feel somewhat safe in believing that retaliation isn't common in tech companies (though it does happen sometimes). But I don't think I would feel safe assuming that generalizes to all jobs in the US.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was quite a lot of exploitation and retaliation at lower-skilled, lower-income jobs in the US.
Corporation don't and can't act. They are pieces of paper. It's people who do things, often evil things. Corporations are shields against accountability of these people. This protection for liability is the entire raison d'etre of corporations.
Any discussion about making things better has to focus on returning accountability to the people that do bad things. Without that, nothing will change.
misleading headline. "They fired me for allegedly taking pictures or videos — but they didn’t know, because no one saw it — when the body of Dariusz, a colleague of mine who had died during his shift, was moved to the hearse, which they considered inconsistent with their values and social standards."
The English is a little confusing - "they fired me for allegedly taking pictures or videos — but they didn’t know, because no one saw it" implies she admits she did take pictures/videos of the dead colleague but Amazon couldn't have known.
If she had had taken photos and shared them with police to prove an accident or bad working practices fair enough, but otherwise I think I would have sacked her too if there was even anecdotal evidence that she had taken photos.
Taking photos at work is almost always a bad idea. I do it for stuff like recording how a bunch of cables are connected to a server so I can put them back, but anything that includes identifiable locations, brand names, and employees is potential trouble.
“Finally, the judge stated that my dismissal could have been caused by my activity. What I was accused of in terminating the contract was not proven during the case. Amazon didn’t manage to provide any evidence to support their position.”
“That is actually what the judge said: that there is a conflict between labor and employer, but the conflict cannot be an argument to dismiss union members.”
It's unclear (probably some language barrier issues) if she was essentially saying "I did take pictures and videos, but there's no way Amazon could have known I did that", or if she was saying "I didn't take pictures and videos, but Amazon is using that as an excuse to fire me".
But even if it's the former, so what? Assuming she was taking those pictures and videos with the intent to document what was going on in case there was something improper, Amazon absolutely should not be permitted to fire her because of it.
Even if she was taking pictures because she's a gossip and wanted to share them with people because it's just generally shocking to see someone die like that... well, I'm still sympathetic to the idea that she was actually fired because she was complaining about the working conditions, and the pictures she took were just a convenient excuse.
I hope courts worldwide continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things. They need to change the calculus — to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots.
" to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots."
He was not crushed by machinery or anything:
"Dariusz worked so hard. His job used to be done by a few people during a shift, but then they made him do all that work alone, pushing around trolleys with heavy boxes."
He was simply pushed working too hard. So a robot doing the job would have been one solution - the other simply an extra human helping, or switching tasks, to something less physically demanding.
True! There might be other solutions, like having management treat people as they themselves would want to be treated. That kind of thing just sounds fairly unrealistic.
Well, robots _will_ put people out of work; I am wholeheartedly for this.
However the difference, is that in the utopia inside my head, we start taxing the rich/corporations and provide UBI to people, our goal should be to mechanise/automate everyone out of jobs where possible and allow them to do whatever they want to with their lives.
The sad truth of the world is smart people invented a machine that can make 10,000 widgets per hour instead of 1 per hour by hand, but did that mean the price of widgets went down? No, and all of the benefits of this machine were reaped solely by a bunch of parasites in suits and ties, who contribute nothing to the world.
> continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things.
Amazon is not punished. That woman was only reinstated in her rock-bottom-wage, back-breaking/RSI-inducing Amazon job.
If she'd have gotten some large sum of money as compensation, or if the court had ordered Amazon to enter good-faith negotiations with the union, or accept some of its demands, or to cease warehouse operations temporary etc. - that would have been punishment.
Overall it seems that American corporate has become embedded in overseas environments and has been fighting other cultures. Tesla in Scandinavia has a more public appearing problem.
Did you stop using AWS? Amazon's retail costs them money, AWS nets them profit. If you think about it, buying from Amazon is kinda like stealing from them.
Ha! I'm sure they wouldn't operate at a loss. They might be investing or having a bad year, but if they were losing money they would shut down the operations.
Once a year around black Friday I start a new prime trial, order a bunch of heavily discounted stuff and cancel the membership. I'm pretty sure there aren't sufficient margins and they are losing money on my order (with the hope most people will keep buying/keep the prime membership).
I predict that Amazon's war chest is such that this kind of abuse with impunity will continue indefinitely unless some powerful countries start seriously acting to break them up. Abuse of labor, distortion of markets, distortion of law and even basic governance are all symptoms of letting companies with both more power than most countries and explicit limitation of liability baked in exist. I'd like to see limited liability killed altogether, but the bare minimum to solve problems like this is very aggressive trust-busting
it is sad (and appalling) that so many people around the world are so addicted to "convenience" and material possessions that Amazon flourishes financially despite the huge number of reasons to avoid using that godforsaken abomination of a company.
I realize AMZN employs a huge number of people around the world and that is "good" for the world economy and I am extremely cynical about both unions and gov intervention in business, so idk what the ideal solution is aside from somehow magically convincing people to not use it and choose options that are less easy/convenient.
"Q: Do you think this ruling will change anything in the immediate future?
A: ... I’m afraid they will not change their policy. ... They’re just smashing everything on their way to making more and more profit."
2. Main takeaway II:
"... Amazon has used Poland as a base from which to attack German unions right next door, either by importing Polish workers as strikebreakers when German warehouses were being picketed or then by simply building warehouses along the German-Polish border to serve the German market and get around German labor laws and unions."
3. Personal suggestion to fellow readers:
Please don't use Amazon, and ask your friends to avoid it as well. Yes, a grass-roots consumer boycott is not the most efficient of measures, but we should at least do _something_ other than just shrug and accept it.
Also, if there is an Amazon facility near where you live - try to figure out if they're trying to unionize. And if they are, try and help them out, or at least donate.
You often can’t stop acquaintances from doing things you don’t condone, but you can stop associating with them and being privy or party to their nonsense.
I can’t stop Amazon from being assholes, but it says something about me if I still participate, let others participate on my behalf.
Readit News
Retaliation is pretty common in the US - I announced to HR that my wife is expecting (Tue) and was fired on Friday.
I don't know how hard this sort of thing is to litigate, "at will" employment covers a lot of abuses, and honestly why would you want to stay at an employer who treats you like this? Probably best to spend your energy finding a new job.
Edit to add: You could report this to the Department of Labor. Not sure you'd personally get any restitution but if your employer was willing to do this kind of thing, you are probably not the only one they have screwed over. If an employer has a record of complaints they might get audited which could cost them a lot in penalties if they are violating the law.
A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.
While this is all true, doing that also allows / encourages the employer to continue their abusive actions toward others.
It's a big decision to fight something like this in the legal system. It might affect your future employement prospects, depending on details.
Grim.
It's not very hard to imagine why someone who is expecting a new child would want to continue to receive a paycheck and health insurance.
I'll continue to boycott Amazon. Earlier in the week I spent about an hour sleuthing the web to find an obscure item that wasn't from Amazon or China, finally found it at a local supplier.
> I announced to HR that my wife is expecting (Tue) and was fired on Friday.
Did you expect this might happen, maybe the baby is due very soon?
It's awful in any case :-(
You're not the only one. I haven't bought anything from Amazon in the past five years or so.
Also, during my announcement to HR about my wife's circumstances, I remarked I wanted to take some time off to be there for wifey & baby.
The company was 90% lawyers so just in case I wanted to proceed legal action against them, their Armada of lawyers made a possible follow-up rather unsavory.
Understood, but you should also know that EPLI deductibles are often in the mid-to-high five figures usually, which is an incentive for the employer to settle for anything less than that deductible.
Point being, if you get a lawyer, threaten to make a stink etc and are generally showing you're serious about fighting this abuse, settlement to the tune of 20-70k is a reasonable expectation. IANAL etc
The silver lining, however, is that these countries make significant headway at a steady pace.
Especially the countries that are part of the EU are constantly improving, partly because they have to adhere to the EU-wide minimum baseline.
So I've got faith they'll get there.
But this lagging behind, for lack of a better world, is also, in part, why many US companies that want to expand into the EU set up bases in countries like Poland. It's generally cheaper and is the “least bad” from the corporations’ perspective regarding labor rights.
I agree! And, they say this bluntly and while chest thumping: ‘we have strong laws against retaliation’ :-)
You disagree with your manager and that as*hole will put you on a pip the very next day
Sorry you lost your job, but I find it difficult to believe that it is solely due to you announcing the arrival of your child. Paternity leave is rarely more than 2 weeks in the US, I can't imagine a company preferring to deal with potential law suit instead of just living 2 weeks without an employee.
That's so low. Really, your former employer is despicable.
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Private ownership of the means of production is more orthogonal to workers rights. There are capitalist economics in countries with very strong workers rights and unions, but where the means of production are still privately owned. Capitalism is fully compatible with strong family and medical leave protections, even though those who own the means of production are disincentived in the short term from giving workers rights. The fact that the US is worse on workers rights isn't a problem unique to capitalism.
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Why would an HR department from any reputable organization fire you if your wife is expecting?
If a company thinks it can get away with it, it will. Saving money is more important than a hypothetical, minuscule and temporary hit to their reputation. There will always be consumers looking for a bargain at any real cost, workers desperate for a pay check, and shareholders worshipping the bottom line.
That’s why we need unions
But for every big tech company there are thousands of smaller non-tech companies, where they do not treat employees well. Also common != majority.
Just read up on how Walmart treats their employees, for example. I just read an article earlier this week about Walmart systematically under-reporting OHSA violations, and retaliating against employees reporting workplace accidents to OHSA.
Just recently here a restaurant was fined for not paying overtime by employing dishwashers and kitchen staff as "salaried" exempt employees.
At large companies with in-house legal and HR teams? It probably doesn't happen much, but even there they will know what they can get away with.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was quite a lot of exploitation and retaliation at lower-skilled, lower-income jobs in the US.
Any discussion about making things better has to focus on returning accountability to the people that do bad things. Without that, nothing will change.
The English is a little confusing - "they fired me for allegedly taking pictures or videos — but they didn’t know, because no one saw it" implies she admits she did take pictures/videos of the dead colleague but Amazon couldn't have known.
If she had had taken photos and shared them with police to prove an accident or bad working practices fair enough, but otherwise I think I would have sacked her too if there was even anecdotal evidence that she had taken photos.
“That is actually what the judge said: that there is a conflict between labor and employer, but the conflict cannot be an argument to dismiss union members.”
But even if it's the former, so what? Assuming she was taking those pictures and videos with the intent to document what was going on in case there was something improper, Amazon absolutely should not be permitted to fire her because of it.
Even if she was taking pictures because she's a gossip and wanted to share them with people because it's just generally shocking to see someone die like that... well, I'm still sympathetic to the idea that she was actually fired because she was complaining about the working conditions, and the pictures she took were just a convenient excuse.
Dead Comment
He was not crushed by machinery or anything:
"Dariusz worked so hard. His job used to be done by a few people during a shift, but then they made him do all that work alone, pushing around trolleys with heavy boxes."
He was simply pushed working too hard. So a robot doing the job would have been one solution - the other simply an extra human helping, or switching tasks, to something less physically demanding.
However the difference, is that in the utopia inside my head, we start taxing the rich/corporations and provide UBI to people, our goal should be to mechanise/automate everyone out of jobs where possible and allow them to do whatever they want to with their lives.
The sad truth of the world is smart people invented a machine that can make 10,000 widgets per hour instead of 1 per hour by hand, but did that mean the price of widgets went down? No, and all of the benefits of this machine were reaped solely by a bunch of parasites in suits and ties, who contribute nothing to the world.
Amazon is not punished. That woman was only reinstated in her rock-bottom-wage, back-breaking/RSI-inducing Amazon job.
If she'd have gotten some large sum of money as compensation, or if the court had ordered Amazon to enter good-faith negotiations with the union, or accept some of its demands, or to cease warehouse operations temporary etc. - that would have been punishment.
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Good point about AWS though.
Over half of amazon's profit comes from retail revenue.
Internally, a lot of amazon retail revenue turns into AWS profit as amazon retail is AWS's biggest customer.
Besides, your individual purchase surely isn't costing them more money than you're spending on it?
Also, did you search for my nickname and AWS? Interesting personality trait...
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/retailers/ten-reasons-avoid-...
https://www.greenamerica.org/blog/10-reasons-not-shop-amazon
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/12/08/11-reasons-t...
https://financebuzz.com/avoid-shopping-on-amazon
I realize AMZN employs a huge number of people around the world and that is "good" for the world economy and I am extremely cynical about both unions and gov intervention in business, so idk what the ideal solution is aside from somehow magically convincing people to not use it and choose options that are less easy/convenient.
"Q: Do you think this ruling will change anything in the immediate future?
A: ... I’m afraid they will not change their policy. ... They’re just smashing everything on their way to making more and more profit."
2. Main takeaway II:
"... Amazon has used Poland as a base from which to attack German unions right next door, either by importing Polish workers as strikebreakers when German warehouses were being picketed or then by simply building warehouses along the German-Polish border to serve the German market and get around German labor laws and unions."
3. Personal suggestion to fellow readers:
Please don't use Amazon, and ask your friends to avoid it as well. Yes, a grass-roots consumer boycott is not the most efficient of measures, but we should at least do _something_ other than just shrug and accept it.
Also, if there is an Amazon facility near where you live - try to figure out if they're trying to unionize. And if they are, try and help them out, or at least donate.
I can’t stop Amazon from being assholes, but it says something about me if I still participate, let others participate on my behalf.