[AZ] My company is audio recording us without consent, prior warning, or mention in our employee handbook or onboarding documents

They are in CA And we are in Arizona.

There’s a number of examples of them listening in and acting on what they heard. Also confirmed by several former employees and online reviews.

Company is full of micromanagers regardless but it’s frustrating they think everyone is too stupid to notice.

Example: coworker complained they didn’t like how they were receiving feedback in their chat and wish they had a word document.

Guess what happened thirty mins later. They received that.

Said coworker also wish there was a spirit week in the office - guess what was announced.

I mentioned I wish how I saw a certain thing being made and guess what happened - both of us and ONLY us on a 5 person team (where 1 other person knows this step already and the other 2 wasn’t shown) - were shown this step.

There’s been a few other things too.

Is this a case for a lawyer?

And no it’s not in the handbook. No mention of surveillance recordings video etc. at all.

I mentioned I think we’re being recorded and within a day or two they put up a sign ‘you are being video recorded live 24/7’

I also heard a story of them eavesdropping on people talking about a managers weight and they got in trouble for it. Lmfao

Jobadvisor

This does sound like something worth having a lawyer actually look at — not because I can tell you you'll win, but because there are a few different legal threads tangled together here that a general subreddit answer can't fully untangle. Here's the landscape (I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice):

The consent question Arizona is a "one-party consent" state (A.R.S. § 13-3005) — a recording is legal if at least one participant in the conversation consents. Federal law (Title III) works the same way. So if your employer secretly records conversations they're actually a party to (like a manager on a call with you), that alone isn't illegal in AZ.

But what you're describing sounds different — it sounds like the company may be recording conversations where no one on the call/chat consented or even knew, via some room mic, device, or software listening in on conversations they're not a party to. If that's what's happening, one-party consent doesn't cover it, because there's no consenting party at all. That's the kind of fact pattern that can implicate wiretapping statutes.

The California wrinkle This is the part that actually makes a lawyer useful. California requires all-party consent (Penal Code § 632). If the recording/software originates from California, is initiated there, or the company is headquartered there, some courts have applied California's stricter standard even to calls with out-of-state employees — this is a real area of litigated conflict-of-laws dispute, not settled and predictable. An employment/privacy attorney licensed in AZ (ideally with some CA cross-border experience) is the only one who can actually evaluate which state's law a court would apply to your specific setup.

Other angles worth having a lawyer eyeball

No disclosure in the handbook/onboarding, but private conduct suggesting real-time monitoring — that's relevant to reasonable-expectation-of-privacy arguments.
The suspicious pattern (feedback formatted the way someone privately wished, spirit week announced right after being wished for, a work step shown only to the two people who'd mentioned it) — this is circumstantial but it's the kind of detail a lawyer can use to build a case for discovery if it comes to that.
The sign going up right after you voiced suspicion is worth preserving — timeline evidence like that matters.
If you or coworkers face any retaliation for raising this, that opens a separate legal issue.

Practically, before you talk to anyone:

Write down every incident with dates, who was involved, and how you found out about the "coincidence" — while it's fresh.
Save the handbook/onboarding materials as they exist now (in case they get quietly updated).
Note when the sign went up relative to when you raised the recording suspicion.
Don't confront the company or record them yourself without knowing your state's law on that first — that's exactly the kind of consult-a-lawyer-first situation.

A consult with an AZ employment attorney (many do free initial consults) would tell you pretty quickly whether you have a viable wiretapping/privacy claim versus just a very unsettling, ethically shady but not clearly illegal workplace. Given the CA/AZ cross-border piece specifically, this isn't really a DIY-research situation.

[MI] my employer wrote my seizure in the misconduct log?

I was given my termination paperwork a few weeks ago and realized that in a handwritten misconduct and disciplinary log, calling off for my grand mal seizure was included as its own bullet point.

I could justify it many ways if it wasn’t for the fact that in 7 years I had called off more than just a few times. Death of my grandma, my mom’s sudden illness/hospital stay and death. Other minor illnesses I’ve had. Those aren’t in there.

A month before my seizure, I was the lead on the shift and miscarried on the bathroom floor. Ectopic pregnancy ruptured, and I had to be rushed to the hospital. NO mention of that in the misconduct log, of course - because that wasn’t my fault.

How do I reconcile with this? I feel like they never understood my condition. Does this prove or imply that? Or no?

Jobadvisor

I'm sorry you're dealing with this on top of everything else you went through this year. That's a lot to carry — losing your grandmother, your mom, your own hospitalization from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, then a grand mal seizure, then losing your job. Finding your seizure singled out in a misconduct log while none of that other absence history appears would understandably make you question whether they ever saw your condition as a health issue instead of a discipline issue.

To your actual question — does this prove or imply they didn't understand your condition, or worse, held it against you:

What it could suggest, legally speaking: The pattern you're describing — attendance-related call-offs logged selectively, with the seizure specifically flagged as "misconduct" while comparable or more frequent absences for other reasons aren't — is exactly the kind of fact pattern that comes up in disability discrimination and FMLA/ADA retaliation cases. A few things a lawyer would want to look at:

Selective documentation is significant. If your absence record shows call-offs for bereavement, family medical emergencies, minor illness, and a seizure, and only the seizure gets written up as misconduct, that's not neutral record-keeping — that's a choice about which absence to treat as a disciplinary event. That choice is evidence, not proof, but it's the kind of thing that supports an inference of discriminatory intent.
Timing matters. A seizure logged as misconduct a month before termination, especially if it played into "final straw" reasoning for firing you, could support a claim that the termination was substantially motivated by your disability or a health condition, which is a violation under the ADA if you're a qualified employee whose condition doesn't fundamentally prevent doing the job (with or without reasonable accommodation).
Whether they knew it was seizure-related, not just "an absence," matters. If your call-off was documented specifically as a seizure (not just "unexcused absence"), that undercuts any argument they didn't realize it was disability-related.
FMLA angle: if you'd been there long enough and worked enough hours, unpaired/uninformed absences tied to a serious health condition might also implicate FMLA interference, especially if they never informed you of your FMLA rights when the seizure or the ectopic pregnancy hospitalization happened.

What it doesn't automatically prove: One log entry alone doesn't establish that the termination itself was because of your seizure or your disability generally — companies can still terminate for a broader attendance pattern, performance issues, or other reasons even where a seizure is part of that record. The strength of a claim depends on the full documentation: your complete attendance record, what reason was given for termination, whether they'd accommodated you before, whether other employees with comparable non-disability absences were treated the same way, etc.

What I'd do: This is worth an actual employment attorney consult — many do free consultations, and disability/FMLA cases are common enough that most employment lawyers can assess this quickly. Bring:

The termination paperwork and misconduct log itself (get a copy if you don't have one)
Any documentation of your full call-off history if you can reconstruct it (dates, reasons, especially the miscarriage/hospitalization and the seizure)
Your termination reason as stated in writing
Any prior write-ups, warnings, or performance reviews

Michigan is an at-will state, but at-will doesn't mean an employer can terminate you because of a disability — that's the exception at-will doesn't cover.

However this shakes out legally, it's also fair to feel like this reflects how they saw you — as a liability to manage rather than a person going through a genuinely brutal year. That reaction makes sense regardless of what a lawyer eventually concludes about the legal claim.

Nothing is more discouraging that failing an interview for a position where you have more experience than most of the existing employees,

I swear if most of the employees at this company had to apply in this market and compete, they wouldn't even land the job themselves. Most of them are only in this company because they joined when the company was much smaller and less competition.

Jobadvisor

That's a rough feeling to sit with — you put in the work, you had the experience, and it still didn't land. There's a particular sting to that kind of rejection because it's not "I wasn't ready," it's "I was ready and it still wasn't enough."

The frustration about the interview bar feeling arbitrary or unfair compared to who's already inside the company is a really common feeling after a rejection like this, and it makes sense that it's where your mind goes right now. Interview processes are genuinely inconsistent — a good one doesn't always predict who'd actually be good at the job, and someone hired years ago under different market conditions never had to clear the bar you just tried to clear. That's a real structural thing, not just you being bitter.

At the same time, I'd gently separate two things: the process failing to capture what you bring, versus the people already there being undeserving. The first is very possibly true. The second is harder to actually know from outside — you're seeing your own effort and their outcome, not their effort or your outcome if things had been different.

What's the actual sting right now — is it more the rejection itself, or the sense that the whole system feels rigged against people applying fresh into a tougher market?