I don’t know if you were addressing the specific case mentioned, but if someone has a softball game they want to go to, and they say they have a medical procedure to take care of, that could easily be grounds for termination.
Best answer I can think of is to unionize and negotiate a CA that includes shift trade rights. Short term, I don’t think there’s much you can do if the company wants to be a dick.
People breed toxicity, especially if you disagree with them. The more people a site has, the shittier it is. People suck.
They drastically altered the shift patterns from a relatively simple 2 day, 2 night, 4 off to a pretty complicated 5 on 3 off with 7 start times that you would cycle through each week. (5 straight 2100-0700 shifts suuuucked.) They also made us bid for team assignments. The real wtf moment was when they didn’t bother posting enough vacancies for everyone to bid on because of the anticipated attrition.
Points for creative thinking, but I would prefer not to get fired and have to seek redress through the courts.