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SALT LAKE CITY — The manager of a Salt Lake eatery has been fired after a video of the woman yelling and firing her employee went viral online.
Ivan Amado Fuentes posted two videos of the incident on Facebook Thursday and explained in his post that he and his siblings had decided to eat at the CoreLife Eatery in City Creek Center, where their mother was working that day.
Amado Fuentes claims that, while there, they remembered their mother had previously told them about a raise she’d been waiting for since the eatery moved her to working the grill at the restaurant.
Their mother was “too scared to ask ... for the raise because she doesn’t speak English very well,” Amado Fuentes wrote in his post. He and his siblings decided to go talk to the manager and try to translate for their mother, he said.
In one of the videos, the manager can be heard telling the person behind the camera that, “you just got your mom fired” as she calls security while the person holding the camera says, “I’m just trying to translate for my mom, and you’re kicking me out.”
The manager then begins speaking broken Spanish to her employee saying, “you no más trabajo (work) here. Your niño and niña no bueno.” She tells the person behind the camera that there’s a good way to go about things, but this is not it.
In the second video, the manager walks away and the person behind the camera tells the employee in Spanish that she should go grab her things, and she tells him she needs to clock out. The manager then comes back and yells at them, “Get the hell out of my restaurant right now! No más, no más, no más,” while her employee attempts to explain why she expected the raise.
“She is a very angry person. She gets mad at everything. You can’t talk about anything you need,” the employee can then be heard saying in Spanish.
When KSL initially reached out to CoreLife for a statement, one of the eatery’s spokesmen, Stephen Donnelly, said the video did not depict everything that happened between the manager, her employee and the employee's children. He explained that the manager acted the way she did because of circumstances not shown in the videos uploaded to Facebook.
Soon after, however, CoreLife held a press conference and announced that the manager in the videos had been fired from the restaurant. CoreLife personnel had initially placed the manager on administrative leave while they investigated the situation, but after speaking with additional witnesses, they decided to terminate her.
“Overall, our investigation determined that while this situation was challenging, the manager’s actions were not appropriate and, as such, we took swift action,” another company spokesman Chris Thomas wrote in an emailed statement.
“More importantly, we are in the process of reaching out to our employee to apologize and begin steps to make the situation right. We are working to implement additional conflict resolution and sensitivity training with both management and team members to help ensure this does not happen in the future," CoreLife said in another emailed statement.
The initial Facebook post by Amado Fuentes has, as of Tuesday afternoon, garnered nearly 5,000 likes and reactions, over 6,000 comments and about 11,000 shares.
A GoFundMe* that claims to be raising money to help the former CoreLife employee has since raised over $2,500 of its $100 goal.
“We wanted to make this gofundme for my mom, after she was fired ‘apparently’ for our fault. ... Anything helps, just for the minimal expenses. Just while we look for a replacement job,” the campaign reads.
*KSL.com does not assure that the money deposited to the account will be applied for the benefit of the persons named as beneficiaries. If you are considering a deposit to the account, you should consult your own advisors and otherwise proceed at your own risk.
