Last week many across the nation were incensed upon learning The Home Depot had fired a 60-year old cashier, who is Black, after a Trump supporter attacked him with a racist rant. Now the $100 billion big box home improvement retailer is offering the man, Maurice Rucker, who worked at the company’s Albany, New York store for a decade, his job back. And he’s saying “no.”
Home Depot told The Hill they’ve “taken another look at this and we are offering Maurice his job back.”
Rucker has several reasons for refusing, including they’re only doing it, he says, because of public pressure.
“It has to do with the media reaction to them firing me,” Rucker told The Washington Post. “The fact they can fire me after 10 years for reacting to someone who is racist is insane.”
Rucker had told a customer told please leash his dog while in the store – a simple request, especially since many stores don’t even allow dogs.
“F**k you. You’re an a*****e, you’re a piece of s**t,” was the response he got, Rucker says.
“He says, ‘If Trump wasn’t president, you wouldn’t even have a job.’ He said, ‘You’re from the ghetto, what do you know?'”
What did Rucker do to get fired? He told the customer he was lucky he was at work, and he didn’t call a manager over to diffuse the situation.
Rucker “said he felt underappreciated, underpaid and overlooked,” the Post notes.
“I felt like there wasn’t a whole lot of love for me there,” Rucker said. “There was a passive bias toward me at that particular store.”
“I went to work every day thinking I could be fired. Every task I did, I wondered if I could get fired for this,” Rucker said.
After working for Home Depot for 10 years, Rucker reportedly barely received a raise. Reports say he went from $12 an hour to just $12.78.
Rucker is now considering legal options.