Just when you think American capitalism and the work environment it’s created couldn’t get any worse, here comes yet another story that moves the bar just a little bit lower.
Tara Rule took to TikTok to reveal a conversation she recently overheard in an airport that is a perfect example or corporate greed. The allegations she’s made, which the company in question has done little to push back on, are truly staggering.
The traveler overheard a Texas Roadhouse exec discussing how to ‘trick’ an ICU-bound employee into resigning.
It’s important to note that this frankly diabolical accusation hasn’t been fully substantiated by Texas Roadhouse or independent reporting and should be taken with a grain of salt.
That said, the company’s response to the claims made by Tara Rule — who herself admits she could have misheard — has done little to dispel the speculation.
Rule said the incident occurred while she was on a layover at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. “Could be wrong but I listened to [three different] convos about the situation,” she wrote in the caption to her post.
In onscreen text, she described what she said she heard: a Texas Roadhouse executive discussing terminating an employee who hadn’t shown up to work in days, whom they found out from Facebook is “fighting for her life” in the ICU.
But “terminating” is really a misnomer. What they intended to do, according to Rule was send a “fake benefits package” to the employee’s home by certified mail so that her husband would have to sign for it. Inside would be a resignation agreement, and her husband’s signature would serve as acceptance of her “resignation.”
“She keeps saying ‘we have to make sure they don’t know what it is,'” Rule wrote of the woman she said she overheard speaking. She also said she heard the exec discussing the employee’s 401(k).
Companies are sometimes entitled to take back their matching 401(k) contributions if an employee quits or is fired before the funds are fully vested.
In many cases, including under federal laws like the Family Medical Leave Act, it is illegal to fire someone for being hospitalized. Hence, presumably, the alleged attempt to “trick” the woman into resigning instead.
Texas Roadhouse denied the allegations, but its defensive social media responses have struck many as suspicious.
In a follow-up video, Rule shared some of the blowback from her video, which went extremely viral on several social media platforms.
On the positive side, online sleuths were able to track down a couple that Rule is reasonably certain are the employee and her husband to give them a heads up.
Texas Roadhouse’s response, however, has raised more questions than it answers. Rule shared screenshots of the company responding to Facebook comments after her video went viral there as well.
In them, the company said, “the allegations in the TikTok are false” and then went on, at length, to accuse Rule of invading the privacy of the Texas Roadhouse execs she overheard. That is absurd, of course. Talking out loud in a public area of an airport carries no reasonable expectation of privacy.
“The allegations in the TikTok are false,” one of the company’s comments read. “Recording and sharing false information on TikTok about a conversation to which this person was not a party was entirely inappropriate and misleading.”
Rule noted that at no point did Texas Roadhouse reach out to her personally. “You could have even sent me a cease and desist if it wasn’t true,” she said. “But you can’t send a cease and desist if it is true, so perhaps that’s why.”
Texas Roadhouse has a long history of employment law violations, and former employees reported harrowing experiences with the company.
Texas Roadhouse also went on to claim in several comments that it is a “people first” company and that it has a deep commitment to its employees. But aside from its defensive tone, stories from those claiming to have worked for the company, as well as the company’s own legal history, indicate otherwise.
Texas Roadhouse has faced multiple lawsuits over everything from federal age discrimination charges to wage theft and failing to provide employees with legally mandated break periods. Independent labor violation trackers have found a litany of wage theft and safety violations at both the federal and state levels as recently as 2023.
And since Rule’s videos have gone viral, people claiming to be former Texas Roadhouse employees have not been quiet about their experiences. “Texas Roadhouse fired me because my grandpa died, and I left early after finding out at work, and they said I made it up to get out of work,” one wrote.
Another wrote of being fired after they were rushed to the hospital following a car wreck outside the Texas Roadhouse location where they worked. “They fired me via voicemail after I called off with a damn neck brace on,” they wrote, adding that a friend who became a manager, “told me some years later there was a locked file with my name on it in case I tried to sue.”
For her part, Rule said that she and other internet sleuths did indeed find the right couple in question and she’s been in contact with the woman’s husband. And she asserted that she is unafraid of Texas Roadhouse’s attempts to intimidate her with accusations of violating their privacy, especially given their fairly incriminating response.
“If they didn’t know exactly what I was talking about, who I was talking about, in the situation I was talking about,” she said, “they wouldn’t have responded this way. What they would have done is conducted an investigation.”
One thing is for sure, and Rule noticed it, too: Texas Roadhouse has a pretty terrible grasp on the basic rudiments of PR. Whether Rule’s claims are accurate or not, Texas Roadhouse’s long history of employee abuses is well documented.
And its toothless threats and defensive response to her allegations certainly isn’t going to do anything but burnish that bad reputation. Imagine going to these lengths when you could simply treat your employees with the respect that employment laws require. You hate to see it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
