Fired for an availability change..

My girlfriend recently accepted a position that requires her to work weekends. Because of this, I needed to change my availability to be off on weekends, to care for our child. I still have 24 hour availability during the week, just not the weekend. Yesterday, my manager told me that this would be my last week, as they just couldn't keep me without having the weekends open. The thing is, looking at the schedule book, there are 11 people that have weekends either unavailable or at least 1 of those 2 days unavailable. This seems like total bullshit to me, but maybe I'm wrong on this?

McCheese_sl said:

What kind of job do you have? The fact that you being available 24 hours a day during the week implies that your job relies heavily on round-the-clock availability. In that case, I can't really fault your employer for factoring your availability so heavily into your employability.

The fact that other people have the schedule you want sucks, but life isn't fair.

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Retail. I know weekend availability is important in that business, but they didn't impress that upon me during hiring. It was mostly just a "dumb" job to make some extra cash while going to school. When I was initially contacted/interviewed, they impressed upon me that all they could guarantee me were 20 hours, more depending on the business needs. They never once said to me, "Hey, we can only guarantee you 20 hours, 16 of which will come from weekend shifts. So you HAVE to be available weekends". If they had said that, I'd have told them to fuck off. She literally said she "couldn't give me hours" without weekend availability, which I know is complete and total bullshit. Why didn't they tell me that upfront? "Oh, by the way! If you aren't available weekends, we can't give you hours!". They have ONE other person for mornings during the week, which is where they struggle. For some reason, most people come in late afternoon-closing. In fact, last Saturday, we had all but 2 people working, and most of us were just standing around with nothing to do. It's way too many people. The store isn't busy enough for that kind of workforce. So to blame it on "weekend availability" seems like complete horseshit.

I realize life isn't fair. But I talked with some people and one girl mentioned to me that when she started, she changed her availability to ONLY work on Saturdays. Guess what? She only works Saturdays. It's becoming apparent to me that they are just trying to "bully" me into opening up my weekend availability, because it makes things easier on them from a scheduling standpoint. When she said they were "letting me go", she told me that she hated doing it because I worked my butt off and was a great worker, but without that availability...blah blah blah. She also said to "Feel free to reapply when your availability opens back up". I think they are expecting that I'll come in Friday and say "Well, I guess I'll work weekends now!". I'm going to go ahead and contact the union and see what they have to say.

Eomer_sl said:

I'm not trying to be an asshole here, but as an employer myself I don't look for reasons to let otherwise good employees go. So it's either that they really only can get you hours on the weekend, or that they don't think you're cutting it in other areas.

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Right, but then why not just say "You're just not a good fit."? Or something similar. She was pretty specific about not being able to give me hours and that it had nothing to do with the quality of my work. I asked her specifically if it was due to me not being productive enough.

Anyhow, the union said they aren't able to do that normally, but seeing as I've been there for 74 days and I'm not yet at my 90, they can essentially do whatever the fuck they want. The union rep said that she'd try other HR departments around town, to see if they could work with my schedule. Knowing how retail is, I'm sure they can't. Hell, this store doesn't evenneedthat availability. Like I said, there were a million of us there on Saturday. About 4 or so more than needed. I used to supervise in retail, so I know it's just a case of them wanting me "available", to make scheduling easier.

Eomer_sl said:

Because telling someone "they're not a good fit" or "you have a shit attitude" is a surefire way to stir the shit so it stinks that much more, for one reason. You're obviously pissed off about being let go over availability issues, I would imagine if they had instead told you that you were a poor employee for whatever reason that you'd be that much more pissed about it. For another, people shy away from that kind of directness.

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Even the union rep found it odd that they went into so much detail about why they couldn't keep me. She said they usually give you a canned response of "Not a good fit", "Our goals aren't the same", etc. Like I said, I really think it's just them trying to bully me into having 100% availability. Expecting I'll come back on Friday(my last day), singing a different tune. Especially when the weekends seem pretty well covered. Jimmies are just so rustled because it's the first job that I've ever been "let go" from.