Story highlights
A UK chef says his restaurant fired him
He tweeted: "Is there some sort of forum for naming and shaming bad employers?"
The chef still has access to the restaurant's Twitter account
He tweets that the restaurant sacked him after he wanted Christmas Day off
If you’ve ever been fired, you know the desire to get even with your boss.
So when Jim Knight was fired from his position as head chef for The Plough, a restaurant in the UK, he had a special opportunity.
He tweeted: “Calling all chefs. Is there some sort of forum for naming and shaming bad employers?”
Someone responded: “I Just like to use twitter” to which he responded “well I better get on the case ;)”
The chef created the Twitter account for his now former restaurant (with its permission, he says) back in October, but it appears his former bosses never got around to revoking his access to it.
So he still had control of the public face for his former employer, and he definitely had something to say.
The headline for The Plough’s Twitter page now reads “Let this be a lesson to all bad catering employers …” and Jim’s view of events got the light of day:
“We’d like to inform you that we’ve just fired our head chef,” he wrote on the restaurant’s official page. “Unfortunately he wanted to have a weekend off this month and Christmas Day this year for family commitments so we thought we’d sack him … yeah a week before Christmas!
We don’t care that he has a 7 1/2 month old baby daughter.”
Nearly a full day after the tweets were posted, they’ve been retweeted thousands of times, and they continue to live on the website.
Calls and e-mails to the restaurant from CNN have not yet been answered.
But the restaurant’s landlord has responded to the tweets, The Oxford Times reported Monday. “When Jim, as head chef, informed me that he would not be working on Christmas Day, and other Sundays in the near future, I was left with little choice but to end our arrangement,” it quoted Steve Potts as saying. “I had been quite clear with him when he started here in October that Sundays are our busiest days of the week, and that all our chefs have to work that day.”
The chef has taken to his personal page to explain his actions a bit more. “I stand by my comments whole heartedly,” he said
Less than 10 days before Christmas, Knight is now unemployed, but his representative says he’s been offered a new job elsewhere since his actions got noticed. She says the restaurant has not contacted him since the firing.
