Workers who were present at the candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, and were injured are now filing a lawsuit against their employer claiming that they were not allowed to leave work before the tornado hit and that they would be fired.

The lawsuit states that people were asking to leave up to 3 hours prior to the tornado hitting the building.

The lawsuit also alleges serious violations of worker safety laws and a massive cover-up scheme to protect the interest of the candle factory in western Kentucky. One of the attorneys representing the survivors, William Davis, calls the factory ‘a modern-day sweatshop.’”

The sad reality is that this really is how a lot of factories operate. They utilize “lean” principles where they really run at a bare minimum staffing and maximum output leaving almost no room for error. I could say a lot about this but I’ll keep it to myself.

I can identify with this to a degree. I know that when I worked at a large factory here in Dixie Alley where tornadoes happen all the time and throughout the year, I’ve had superiors tell me that I wouldn’t be able to leave work if certain conditions arose, like if there was an threat of severe weather.

To tell you just how crazy it was, they actually had someone who monitored the weather for that specific location and if it was extremely close, we would have to go to our “storm shelter” which was either the bathrooms in the main building or the break room. Even if there was a tornado warning in the area, but it wasn’t close enough to the location of our facility, we would just keep working.

Personally, I’ve never cared about what they said regarding whether or not I could leave work. This is America and I can do what I want. Nobody else is in charge of me.

I can even recall once that there was a round of storms that had passed and another that was coming. I analyzed the radar and made the decision that I could make it home before they arrived so I left work.

Some people though do what they’re told regardless, and that seems to be what happened in Kentucky as well as at the Amazon warehouse in Illinois.