Suspended Without Pay For Missing A Meeting On Day Off With 30 Minutes Notice.

Location: Indiana and North Carolina.

Looking for some clarity on a weird situation with an employer. A full-time, salaried employee (E) works remotely in Indiana for a startup business located in North Carolina.

Boss runs the company by the seat of his pants. Rules are made on the fly and hours are extremely flexible to his individual needs. The employees are all scheduled for 4 day work weeks, which is heavily pushed during the hiring process, but the reality is an expectation of 24/7 availability to Boss and clients. Recently, Boss implemented a system of scheduling on call hours so employees could actually understand expectations during their “time off.” E was told he was entirely off on Fridays and would work 1-2 on call shifts over the weekend.

Thursday evening, Boss scheduled a meeting for the following week. Friday morning, E is off work but Boss sent out a memo at 8:30am rescheduling said meeting for 9am the same day. E was off so he did not receive the memo and therefore was not in the meeting. Following the meeting, Boss sent an angry message and said they’d talk about it on Monday. This morning, Boss informs E that he will be placed on a week long suspension without pay. His reasoning is primarily the meeting E missed on his day off as well as 3 alleged discussions (that Boss has no record of, nor does E) about decreased performance. The only discussion about performance on record was several weeks ago after E was out sick for most of the week, and E was told that those issues were resolved.

Is this allowed? There is no outlining of any disciplinary measures for missing meetings scheduled on or for days off. There are several video and audio recordings of Boss discussing the priority of respecting time off, even stating that another employee should ignore a meeting if it gets scheduled on her day off. This came as a shock, so I’m hoping someone might be able to explain how something like this could happen.