Whole Foods Sued for Firing Valuable 'Poop Leak Whistle Blower'
Given Whole Foods' status as "one of America's best places to work (for herpes-union haters)," you might be surprised to hear that a couple years ago the company fired a whistle blower. And not just any old whistle blower, either, but a "poop leak whistle blower": a sewage sniffer-outer, a foe of feces fraud.
A poop leak whistle blower uses her highly developed olfactory gifts to detect the scent of raw sewage on the premises. She's a valuable kind of employee, preserving the pleasant shopping environment for your customers and also promoting integrity in the workplace. She definitely doesn't deserve to be fired! But that's exactly what happened to the poop leak whistle blower at the Whole Foods in Miami Beach, Florida—identified by the Miami New Times as "Janet"—who, back in 2009, discovered that store management ignored the poop-flood emanating from the store's bathrooms and invading the "specialty cheese department" by locking the bathroom up and spraying lots of air freshener. Workers started getting sick from the smell, but managers told them to "go back to work."
Janet placed an anonymous tip on the company hotline to complain, but nothing improved. Then she directly went to corporate about the scheme. Soon thereafter, she was canned "for allegedly making false and malicious statements to the effect that management had not taken any steps to redress the sewage contamination at the workplace." Management had sprayed Glade! Or whatever organic lemon-infused bullshit-in-a-can they grabbed from their own shelves. That's taking action.
Luckily for Janet, the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration values a dedicated poop leak whistle blower and is suing Whole Foods on her behalf. If she wins her suit, Janet will receive back wages, benefits, and a lifetime supply of those muted-color veggie stix.
