Archive link to the story. There should be some consequences to the management who didn't allow them to leave when the flash flood warning was issued.
We really need to break our conditioning that employment is the highest priority in our lives. That employers can dictate whether we take live saving action depending on how many pennies it'll cost them.
And this isn't to victim blame. What happened to these people is a travesty and the company holds the blame for it, 100%. It's more to point out that we're the only ones that can take action on this. Nobody (certainly not corps) is going to break this mindset or norm on our behalf. Look out for yourself and your peers. You're more important then your employer's bottom line.
I worked at a major destination-store focused on fishing and hunting products.
We had a hurricane hitting and the manager on duty made it clear that anyone going home to help out their families would be fired. Then when he got the call that water was rising near his house, he took off.
I've never hated a manager more than in that moment. When I was in management later, I made sure that I took all the shitty holiday shifts so my staff didn't have to work until 10pm on Christmas Eve and then be back in the building changing prices for the after-Christmas sale at 2am on the 26th.
Didn't this happen during the last Hurricane as well? Oh it was 2021
If "a state of emergency" doesn't protect workers who are fleeing said emergency in the same way that jury duty and voting rights do, then they are broken and need to be fixed.
Look, I know it's not the point, and that is an insane story that should have serious consequences for those responsible...
...but "PTO time" is bothering me more than I'd like.
The worst part is the Trump appointed SCOTUS basically made this legal to do.
EDIT: This comment of mine was misleading and unfair. Neil Gorsuch was not on the SCOTUS when he decided a truck driver forfeit his job without means of legal recourse by choosing to abandon his trailer and prevent death from Hypothermia.
Didn't the triangle waistshirt fire happen because the employers were fucking assholes and locked the fire escapes? This is like that, but with water instead of fire.
Honestly, in the course of our species living in servitude to a few thousand sociopaths who've used their capital/power to convince us that meaningless productivity for toxic economic metasisis is "the only way forward" and the meaning of life, I've come to realize their terraforming of our only habitat against our physically fragile species in their blind, reckless pursuit of ever moar is a purely accidental mercy.
Extinction is far preferable to generation after generation sacrificing themselves from cradle to grave solely to enrich our modern pharoahs of avarice and their nepo progeny without end. Sometimes extinct is better.
You're free to disagree, of course, but better to see the silver lining in what our species is quite literally dead set to do and well into accomplishing. Im just glad greed caused climate change won't permit this torturous, exploitative civilization to continue for more than another half century or so.
JFC.
Do employers not have a duty of care to their employees over there?
Or the word “twice”?
Meanwhile, at my workplace, we had to evacuate over the possibility of roads flooding in a tropical storm.
I thought this kind of nonsense was a thing of the past.
I hope their productivity wasn't impeded by this minor inconvenience. I'd hate it if their dying led to their employer making marginally less money. So rude of them.
