Are you going to pay the legal fees?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

While it's entirely possible this was a douche employer/manager that posted the sign, it's also possible it was meant as a deterrent against the chronic complainers that will whine and cry if a few flakes fall on their car. Any excuse to get out of working, really. And if it's a holiday or weekend, all the better.

Sorry to sound bitter, but having worked fast food & retail and getting screwed with call-outs has made me suspicious of people claiming they're "snowed-in". Telling them someone will give them a ride will change the story to "snowed-in out of town" or some other emergency.

While this definitely is a valid point, couldn't the employer have found a way to put these kinds of people on notice without exposing themselves to humongous potential liability?

[protege]

As much as I agree with you, sometimes the claim IS legit. At least it is when I'm forced to call in for snow. See, where I work (and now live) is very often a few degrees warmer than where I used to live with my inlaws. The area around Halifax Harbour can have dramatically different results from the same storm, e.g.

Same here. I live well outside the Pittsburgh city limits. We usually do get more snow and ice than people inside the city, or even slightly north of the city. When we had the last big storm (2010), we got about a *foot* more snow than they did. The night that storm hit, it took a good 3 hours to get home, and yes, driving was bad. That weekend, we got an additional 2 feet of snow Meaning, that I didn't even bother attempting to dig the car out. Snow was coming down faster than I could remove it. Following Monday, I had to call in and tell my boss that there was no way in hell I could get to work. Sure, my block was clean (there's an elementary school around the corner), but where would I go? The rest of my street--not to mention the damn borough--was pretty bad. Where I live, I have to either go up a steep hill, or down a steep hill to get out. Plus, with the city's horrible street-cleaning reputation, I wasn't about to take a chance. I'm sure he was pissed, but oh well. I don't get paid enough to put my life in danger getting to work. I've been at my job the longest, have the longest commute (about an hour), and I rarely call off. If I'm calling in to tell you I can't get there...trust me, I CAN'T* get there!

[Grendus]

In Texas, the weather is almost never severe enough to call off, but I did have the misfortune to have to work one overnight shift where we had freezing rain. Fortunately, they were understanding about the class I had later that day (that hadn't been cancelled yet) so I could get out when my shift ended... but my car doors were frozen shut. After half an hour of finagling with an ice scraper, a water bottle, and a lot of brute force I managed to get passenger side door open, crank the heat up to full, and wait another 45 minutes for the front window to thaw enough to see. Then it was a 20 minute drive turned three hour odyssey to find a route home that didn't include more than a 10 degree incline. And with all of that hell, we still had a pretty decent trickle of customers coming into the store when I left to justify the managers asking everybody to stay and calling around to find more staff. Retail will out, I suppose.

All that to say: if an employer ever told me I had to come in during hellish weather like that, regardless of my vehicular situation, I'd show them a new place to post their notice.