An employee at an Alberta pharmacy is suing her former boss after she said she was told to wake up early, walk to the kitchen and have sex with a colleague in order to stay awake.
In a statement to CBC News, Amber Moseley said she has “been told by numerous employees that they were being paid to do this, and they were not being paid for it.”
The woman, who has not been identified, told CBC News that she started working for the pharmacy in January 2015.
She told CBC she was paid $1.20 an hour.
She said the pay was tied to how many hours she worked and not how long she worked.
She said she got sick on the day she started, and she didn’t know why she got it.
“I was on medication, I didn’t have any medical problems,” she said.
“I just had an idea I needed to get to sleep.”
When she woke up the next morning, she said, she was being paid $2.30 an hour for the work she had done.
Moseley, now 24, was told she needed to sleep because she had been working late on her shift and didn’t want to make her boss angry, the statement said.
She was told the next day she had to go back to sleep and be paid $3.50 an hour until she finished work, the complaint says.
The woman also was told that she had a duty of care to ensure her colleagues were safe, it said.
The claim was filed in the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench on Wednesday.
It says she also was forced to go home and get some food, and said she told her boss, who then told her she needed some sleep.
Moss says the pharmacy owner told her it was an “internal” matter.
“He said, ‘I don’t want you to worry about me.
I’ll take care of it,'” she said in the statement.
Mosesley’s lawyer, James Strain, said the case has a lot of parallels to other workplace disputes.
“We know that the workplace can be a place of fear, of conflict and of violence,” he said.
Strain said the lawsuit is not about money.
“It’s not about the money, it’s about a fundamental principle.”
Mosely is asking for unspecified damages and to have the case dismissed.