24 Jul Home Depot Forced To Backtrack After Firing Long-Term Employee For Defending Himself Against Racist Customer

Racism has no place in this world. People should be able to walk the streets without the fear of prejudice, and one place people should feel safest and protected is at their place of work. However, this wasn’t the case for one long-serving Home Depot employee.

If you haven’t heard about what happened to 60-year-old Maurice Rucker, then hold on to your hats, because this story is a doozy.

Rucker had worked at Home Depot for the last ten years. He had even recently won a Cashier of the Year award, but all that didn’t seem to matter when he attempted to verbally defend himself against an abhorrent racist attack from a customer.

The incident took place in Albany, New York after Rucker, who is black, calmly asked a white man to keep his dog on a leash while inside the store. The man then launched into a racist rant, which Rucker describes as verbal abuse that was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

Rucker recalled the confrontation to WNYT. He explained, “I said to him, ‘Sir when you have your dog in here we prefer that you keep it on a leash.’ He turned around and said, ‘F**k you. You’re an asshole you’re a piece of s**t.”

The irate customer didn’t stop there. He continued to discriminate against Rucker and claimed that the POTUS was the only reason Rucker had a job in the first place. This simply was not true as Rucker had been employed at Home Depot for a decade.

According to Rucker, the man also said, “You’re from the ghetto, what do you know?”

While Home Depot protocol is to defuse the situation and call a manager, Rucker could no longer take the escalating personal attack and eventually said, “You’re lucky I’m at work, because if I wasn’t, this wouldn’t be happening, or you wouldn’t be talking to me like this”.

The customer then left, but soon returned to the home improvement warehouse because he forgot his dog and made a point to seek out Rucker again just to verbally abuse him some more. The man then called Home Depot to complain about Rucker, claiming that Rucker had actually been racist to him and issued physical threats.

Check out Rucker’s emotional response to finding out he would be losing his job, simply for defending himself: 

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“He said that I was being racist and that I said I would knock him down. He just told him a bunch of lies and it seems like they believed him,” Rucker explained to WNYT.

A few days later, when Rucker showed up for his next shift, he was told that he was fired. Ten years of loyal service didn’t seem to matter. “The problem here is that he had several opportunities to disengage and contact management to deal with the customer”, A Home Depot Spokesperson told WNYT.

“We’re appalled by this customer’s behavior, but we also must require associates to follow proper protocol to defuse a situation for the sake of their safety and the safety of other associates and customers,” he added.

However, upon news of Rucker’s story going viral, many people saw Home Depot’s decision to fire Rucker as siding with the racist customer. Social media was buzzing with users vowing to never shop at the home improvement giant ever again.

Many journalists and public figures also shamed the company online for firing Rucker as well as digging up other embarrassing employee issues, which was obviously bad for business. Allegedly another Home Depot store in Florida fired an employee because he was about to take medical leave.

As a result, Home Depot has now reversed their decision and offered Rucker his job back.“We’ve taken another look at this and we are offering Maurice his job back,” reads an email from Home Depot spokesperson Matt Harrigan.

However, Rucker has since spoken out and revealed that he is refusing his former employer’s offer, believing it to be a “hollow” response to the situation:

“They aren’t really reacting to my situation. They are reacting to the community reaction and press reaction to my situation

“I know hundreds of people who say they are going to cut up their Home Depot credit card and more that are saying they are never going to shop there again.”

While this brave decision will mean Rucker will be out of a job, the kind people of the internet have rallied behind him set up a GoFundMe campaign in his honor. The goal is to raise $5,000 for him, which is a very nice thing to do considering he was only making around $12.50 an hour.

Perhaps Home Depot will step up and offer Rucker a generous severance package for the emotional distress he had to endure? No business wants to be associated with racism because, as history proves, those businesses fail very quickly, especially in the age of social media. Karma is swift. Don’t be a racist jerk.

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