Woman in plane crash fights for job

The day that Debbie Ramsey stepped off US Air Flight 1549 in the middle of New York’s icy Hudson River on Jan. 15, she stepped into the pages of history.
Whether she wanted it or not, she was in the media spotlight, along with the other passengers and flight crew that brought the giant aircraft down safely on the river after an engine failure. The engines had caught fire shortly after the plane took off from LaGuardia airport in New York, en route to Charlotte, N.C.
The newspapers and television stations have gone away now, but Ramsey’s traumatic experience was not the end of it. Shaken from the events, she had to go to doctors for treatment of a nervous condition.
She says her doctors counseled her to remain at home but finally allowed her to return to the manager/buyer job she loved at New York New York Clothing Co. in the Tanger Outlets in Pigeon Forge for 4 to 5 hours a day, five days a week.
She said when she returned to work, she heard nothing from her employers about her situation. Instead she received her customary daily “marching orders” and instructions about specific issues. When she didn’t hear anything more about her own problems, she says she called them to ask if they’d received her doctor’s letter regarding her work schedule and asking what she should do.
Ramsey’s clinical psychologist, Max Overton of Sevierville, wrote in a letter to Haya Kadosh, “I am confident that she [Ramsey] would benefit from maintaining a collegial relationship with you and other store personnel. Hopefully she can continue to view herself as a valued employee who will receive your assistance in recovering from her work-related injury.”
The answer shocked her, she says.
“I don’t like it,” Ramsey said her employer, Haya Kadosh, told her. “It’s just not going to happen. I have to have a manager there and you can’t do that job in 30 hours a week.”
But Ramsey says Kadosh told her they would talk again when she returned from a trip.
Ramsey says she continued working until Monday, Feb. 23. The week prior, she says, she worked about 60 hours.
That Monday, she got her morning instructions as usual. She says Madoff asked about her medical condition and she replied, “Not good.” The other owner, Eli Kadosh, had called to instruct her to dismiss an employee. She says during the day they called her repeatedly until finally, “I broke down. My nerves were shot.”
On Feb. 23, she returned to her doctor and he put her on Workers’ Comp to protect her status at work. After all, she says, she was injured while on the job – she was on a buying trip for the spring clothing line for the store when the plane plunged into the Hudson River.
On March 4, she received an e-mail from Haya Kadoff in response to her own e-mail, asking how things were going and inquiring about a paycheck she was due.
The reply was Spartan in content: “I hope you are well. Vera is the new Manager for Five Oaks, and she is recruiting a new crew.”
“They had told me at first that I would have my job back when I felt well enough,” Ramsey said. She had been managing the Five Oaks store. “The e-mail was pretty cold-hearted of them.”
Ramsey is so angry about the situation that she hired Knoxville attorney Ralph Brown to protect her interests, including representing her in her Workers’ Comp claim. Brown was unavailable for comment.
“You must know that I’m not doing any of this for revenge,” Ramsey said. “But I think people need to know what happened because it could happen to them. I am really hurt about this.”
Haya Kadoff, her employer at New York New York, strongly disputed that Ramsey was fired and was upset to learn Ramsey had talked to a newspaper.
“This is very rude for us, that she went and talked to your newspaper. Why would you do something like this? Why is this a story, anyway?” she said.
“The truth is, we’ve been asking her several times to see what is going on and if she will return to work,” Haya Kadosh said in a telephone interview this week. “We asked her what we should do and she answered ‘You do what you have to’.”
Kadosh acknowledged her e-mail to Ramsey on March 4 but says it was not a dismissal.The e-mail does not say she was being fired, she added.
“Her position is still open,” Kadosh said. “When she is off Workers’ Comp she can talk to us about her job.
However, Kadosh would not explicitly state that Ramsey could have her old job back when she regains her health. “By law, I know we have to hire her back after Workers’ Comp,” she said and added that she would have to talk to Ramsey first.
Ramsey says she feels she has, indeed, been fired. She says on her attorney’s instructions, she won’t talk to Kadosh.
“Kadosh,” she said, “must talk to my lawyer.”