A woman on TikTok has recently gone viral after calling out the company where she worked for firing her without any prior warning.
The people of TikTok love workplace drama. Olivia’s video was posted on June 26 and has since amassed almost 12 million views as of the time of writing. The short clip simply shows her reaction along with text that explains the situation, “when my ‘boss’ for my internship takes me out of the slack gc, logs me out of the TikTok & blocks me on iMessage.” That’s clearly a pretty bad sign and yet Olivia was completely clueless as to what it was all about.
Unfortunately, unfair dismissals like this are something that happen all too often and so people were quick to sympathize. Viewers soon discovered that Olivia had been working for Poppi Cosmetics and some of the comments responding to the video offered support. One individual valiantly declared “We ride at dawn to cancel Poppi Cosmetics in your honor!” Others shared their own stories about being let go in brutal ways by their bosses.
However, a majority of the comments suspected there was more to the story, and there’s plenty talking about the statement the company made in response to Olivia’s video. A lot of the support for Olivia evaporated after Poppi Cosmetics came forward with its own side of the story, with comments defending the company filling the comment section. But what exactly did Poppi Cosmetics say? And was the company in the right all along?
Poppi Cosmetics responds
The company posted a TikTok a week later containing a paragraph of text which essentially accused Olivia of asking her boss to lie about the number of hours she had worked at the company in order to receive credits for her university course. Poppi Cosmetics also claims that Olivia had not disclosed that she was doing the internship as part of a college course and so these two reasons gave the justification to fire her with no warning.
It seems like a reasonable explanation, although you would have to wonder why Olivia’s boss didn’t discuss this with her and elected to instead simply block her on everything and give no explanation. Is there even more to this story?
Olivia responds to Poppi Cosmetics
It turns out there is indeed more to the story as Olivia would return to elaborate and refute parts of the company’s statement. In a seven-minute-long video she claims that she did in fact inform her boss that she wanted her internship to count for credits and the boss, whose name is Niki apparently, knew from the beginning that she was in college so that was always going to be likely.
Another important point that Olivia contests is the accusation that she asked Niki to lie about the amount of hours worked. The course required students to work 15-20 hours per week over a course of two months, and while Olivia admits she likely hadn’t worked that many hours a week, she had been working for Poppi Cosmetics for eight months meaning she would have actually done much more than the required hours. Finally, she points out that all this happened in May, but she wasn’t let go until a few weeks later in June.
Something definitely seems fishy about this company’s behavior and after Olivia’s response, those that chose to follow the story seem to have come to the conclusion that she may be in the right after all. As of writing Poppi Cosmetics has yet to respond and it seems like Olivia is yet to receive an answer as to why she was fired.