hap

BONITA SPRINGS: Ten Hispanic employees of Rhodes Restaurant were fired for attending The Great March instead of going to work.

Francisco Salsar, one of the former Rhodes employees, went to work on Tuesday only to find that he had lost his job.

The restaurant's owner, Charley Bohley, admitted that they are seriously short-staffed but said he had no choice.

Bohley said he passed out a memo that stated if they did not show up to work they would lose their job.

"We're here to make money. People work to make money and we can't have employees, no matter who they are, saying, Well I'm not going to show up because of this or that," said Bohley. "We let them know they were going to lose their job if they didn't work. They made that decision."

He felt his employees could have protested in a way that did not hurt his business, because he was not the one they were protesting against.

Salsar says that he was not a seasonal worker, nor was anyone else that was fired. He said some of them had worked at Rhodes for four years. They considered the memo a threat, not a promise.

"We feel betrayed actually, we do, we feel betrayed," said Salsar. "We're legal but we all have illegal relatives and we have to help them somehow."