The union man told me my replacement had been approved for the job three weeks before I was terminated. He said the company had listed the position as a “temporary reassignment,” even though my termination letter said the role was being eliminated for safety reasons. Then he told me the replacement’s medical clearance had been signed by the same doctor who had cleared me every year. I asked him to explain how I could suddenly be considered unsafe while they were putting another sixty-six-year-old man on the same forklift. He said, “That’s the easy part.” The harder part was a note in my personnel file that had nothing to do with my tremor.
I requested my complete file through the union that afternoon. There was a disciplinary report dated two months before my termination claiming I’d refused to operate the forklift during an overnight shift. I knew exactly why I hadn’t done it—I had been at the hospital with my wife that night, and my approved leave was attached to the original schedule. My supervisor had signed the report anyway and marked it as an “unexcused refusal.” Then I found a second document showing the company had already interviewed my replacement before that incident supposedly happened. The union man told me this was the first time he’d seen evidence that my termination had been planned before the safety complaint existed.
My attorney compared the dates, and the timeline became impossible to explain. The company had selected my replacement, created a disciplinary record, and then used my tremor as the final reason to remove me five months before my full pension. They eventually withdrew the safety-based termination and offered me the pension benefits I would have earned if I had stayed until retirement. I also received payment for the lost wages and the false disciplinary record was removed from my file. The replacement kept his job, and I never blamed him for accepting it. They said my hands made me a safety risk, but the only thing they were really afraid of was my name staying on that forklift for five more months.
