Pizza Hut Threatens To Punish Employees Evacuating From Hurricane Irma
When a devastating hurricane is about to pass through your state, the last thing you want to worry about is getting in trouble at work, but a Florida Pizza Hut put its employees in an uncomfortable position, as it set some evacuation rules that seemed a bit unreasonable.
A photo appeared on Reddit, showing this Pizza Hut’s employee evacuation guidelines from a Jacksonville store, and it started off by saying, “Our #1 priority is the safety and security of our team, but…” and that “BUT” was a huge one.
Apparently the Pizza Hut planned to stay open between six to 12 hours before the storm hit, so if employees didn’t request that day off to evacuate, they had to come in, or else face “no call/no show documentation.” On top of that, employees were not able to evacuate too early, and only had a 24-hour grace period from being scheduled a shift. In other words, if someone wanted to evacuate Thursday, before the heart of the storm hit Sunday, they would not be able to, or else the store would reprimand them.
If by grace, you did get that evacuation request granted, you’d have to return within 72 hours, and that part of the statement was in bold.
Of course that’s ridiculous and it didn’t take long for the Pizza Hut to get dragged by angry Twitter users who saw the guidelines:
Major @pizzahut fail. I don’t eat your ick pizza, anyway – haven’t in decades – but this is truly shameful. #peoplefirst #irma #pizzahut pic.twitter.com/qkWbcdXOjk
— Katie Mueller (@KatieM606) September 10, 2017
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Just Pizza Hut threatening to fire staff fleeing from Hurricane Irma because “we have a responsibility to our community”. pic.twitter.com/BhIpC2tSfh
— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) September 10, 2017
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Fuck. That. Noise. Workers deserve to be safe and to ensure that their families are safe. @pizzahut this is not American. #irma
— Joan Allen (@Jallen_sf) September 10, 2017
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Pretty #harsh #PizzaHut with Category 4 storm approaching. Think they need a #union. #heartless #capitalism #hurricaneirma #Irma #workers pic.twitter.com/ySoh1AW75e
— Heytampa (@heytampa) September 11, 2017
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Pizza Hut is really trying to get me to work delivery through Hurricane Irma
— Benny Boy (@PisarisBen) September 5, 2017
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Thankfully, Pizza Hut corporate responded to the outcry, apologized, and confirmed that they “addressed the situation with the manager involved. Pizza Hut’s statement read:
“We are uncompromising in our commitment to the safety and well-being of our team members. All locations in the path of Irma are closed and will remain closed until local authorities deem the area safe. We absolutely do not have a policy that dictates when team members can leave or return from a disaster, and the manager who posted this letter did not follow company guidelines. We can also confirm that the local franchise operator has addressed this situation with the manager involved.”
Thankfully the big guns upstairs stepped in, because if anything happened to any of the employees trying to flee the Irma’s destructive path as a result of those strict employee guidelines, this could have been a much worse story.
