Workplace Nightmares·
FIRED AFTER OSHA CALL
A Georgia worker claims they were fired one week after contacting OSHA, while the boss cites incomplete tasks and a whistle-blower investigation complicates accountability.
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One week after a phone call to OSHA, a worker in Dalton, Ga., says their boss fired them for vague, unfinished tasks, right after the complaint reached the company.
"Exactly one week ago today on the 28th of July, I made a phone call to OSHA regarding my boss," the poster wrote. According to them, the call did not go nowhere. "The claim I made was valid, per the OSHA investigator I had on the line," they said, adding that OSHA contacted the boss the same day.
At that point, the boss was away on vacation.
The poster says the timing turned strange over the weekend. The boss returned, and on Sunday, the worker was let go. The stated reason, they said, was a set of tasks the boss claimed had not been completed. But the poster says that explanation did not match what actually happened.
They say the boss had given a very specific list, and every item on it had been done. When the poster asked for clarification about the tasks, the boss read the message and never answered. "he didn't respond," the poster later wrote.
In the first version of the post, the worker asked bluntly, "I just want to know what I should do now?"
An edit added another twist. The poster said they had spoken with a regional whistle-blower complaint investigator, who decided the complaint route would not move forward because the poster had made a few mistakes in the first 90 days of employment. The boss had already cited those mistakes as part of the reason for the firing.
Later, the boss sent an updated text message listing specific reasons for the termination. The poster said some of those reasons were wrong and some were right.
With the whistle-blower path shut down, the poster shifted focus to the OSHA case itself. They wrote that they wanted their former boss held accountable for "2 (have been investigated and confirmed) or 3 (the third is under investigation right now) individual OSHA violations." They said they already had case numbers for each one.
"I am going to take accountability for the mistakes I made and why he fired me," the poster wrote. But they also said the boss had "still took advantage of me and other employees in the past."
For now, the story sits in that uneasy middle ground: one worker out of a job, one boss accused of violations, and an OSHA complaint that appears to have landed before the firing did.