Getting fired over making a mistake is one thing, but being wrongfully terminated just based on an assumption is absolutely unreasonable. A diabetic woman working as a private pilot for a freight company in Michigan was fired after someone found one of her insulin pump syringe caps under my desk. This wasn’t even a needle that touches skin, but one that transfers insulin to her pump from the vial. When she asked the reason for her being fired, the company told her that she wasn’t “a good fit and it wasn’t going to work out.”
“I’ve never been terminated before, so it’s just a shock, and they will not tell me why. The whole airport was also shocked, as well as the pilots I was working with,” she writes sadly in her post on Reddit. This was during her first week at the company, and all the feedback on her performance thus far was positive. However, she and many other online users suspect that it was because someone had discovered her insulin needle cap and reported it to management.
“The only logical reasoning they would have fired you from the needle is [that] they think you [are] doing drugs. It doesn’t matter if they knew you were using medicine because if you only told one person, that’s all it takes,” remarks one commenter. “They shoulda asked you about it instead of jumping to conclusions,” adds another user. The diabetic woman also believes that, instead of drugs, perhaps management thought she might be a liability because a medical device was not properly disposed of. After, she claims that her employer knew that she was diabetic.
But if she were to be fired due to her use of insulin needles, then everyone agrees that would be wrongful termination. “Firing a diabetic because they use an insulin syringe would be likely illegal,” reads one highly upvoted comment. If that truly is the case, then that would open up the company to being vulnerable to legal action, which is likely why management chose not to disclose the specifics on why they fired her.
But since the employer did not have the decency to be upfront and honest about her termination, she concludes that the freight company was probably not worth working for anyway. One commenter suspects a really messed-up reason for her getting fired might be that “they figured out you were on insulin, and that would raise their insurance premiums for employees’ health insurance.” If that’s the case, then “that’s fucked,” as the Michigan pilot puts it.
