Subway Worker Claims She Was Forced To Make Sandwiches While Throwing Up

While people, especially those who get paid by the hour, might be tempted to play down an illness in order to make it through a shift, anyone in food service who is throwing up because of a stomach virus should be kept far away from the kitchen. But one former Subway worker in Texas claims her boss forced her to work through her illness.

“I was going back and forth to the bathroom, puking my guts out,” the woman tells Click2Houston. “I was sweating, I was drenched in sweat. I felt weak.”

She says she told her manager at the sandwich shop about being ill, but that the manager put her right back to work.

“Hey, I’m throwing up,” she recalls telling her boss, who she claims responded with “I don’t care. Get back on the line.”

“So until about one o’clock, I was on the line making sandwiches and she knew I was sick,” claims the former sandwich artist.

Her condition apparently deteriorated to the point where an employee at the restaurant next door ended up calling an ambulance for the sick worker, who says she didn’t want to leave work out of fear of losing her job.

That worker at the neighboring eatery then posted photos of the incident to Facebook warning people to avoid that Subway, because “I witnessed an employee vomiting and her manager telling her to just switch shirts.”

The ill employee was subsequently fired. Subway claims that her dismissal was due to “poor performance and insubordination.”

Unsanitary food handling can result in the quick spread of food-borne illnesses. For example, back in 2010 a single Subway in Illinois was tied to at least 78 cases of bacterial infection Shigellosis, whose lovely symptoms include diarrhea, vomiting, fever and stomach cramps.

[via Eater]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist