Back from a year overseas, he says his general-manager job had no store and no staff
A car wash chain fired a National Guard staff sergeant two days after he complained of military-service bias, a federal lawsuit alleges.
The complaint, filed September 8, 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Kansas, comes from a former general manager who serves in the Kansas Army National Guard. He says Club Car Wash treated his service as a problem to manage and, over four years, blocked his advancement before pushing him out.
The worker joined the operator in February 2021 and moved up into management while keeping up regular drill and stretches of training, according to the filing. The first flashpoint came in October 2022. The complaint says the company told him he would be promoted to an area manager role in Wichita, then gave the job to someone else after he had spent weeks preparing to hand off his store. Leadership, the filing states, "questioned his dedication to the company."
Most of the case turns on what happened after a longer absence. His unit deployed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in December 2023 for a year, and he gave the company advance notice, the complaint says. He came home in January 2025 and asked to return to work. Rather than his old general manager post, the filing states, he was first offered a lower-paid manager-in-training position. After he objected, the company gave him a general manager title with no store and no staff to supervise - what the complaint calls "a General Manager position in name only." An actual general manager role, it says, did not follow until July 1, 2025.
The pattern repeated later that year, according to the complaint. He applied for an open area manager job in September 2025. About two weeks later he received orders for a six-week National Guard sniper school and turned them over to the company. Three days after that, he learned he had not gotten the promotion. When he asked why, a regional manager told him he had been passed over because he left his store for six weeks, the filing says.
Then came a January 6, 2026 meeting. The complaint says a director of operations pointed to a photo from sniper school in his office and asked, "what are you doing in this photo, getting ready to kill somebody?" Two days later, the filing says, the company handed him a performance improvement plan citing "his personal and the site's poor performance" and his "overall attitude toward his job duties and the company." He called the plan inaccurate and offered to sign a corrected version. The company fired him instead, on January 8, 2026, and skipped the coaching-and-warning steps its own discipline policy usually requires, according to the complaint.
The case rests on USERRA, the federal law that protects the civilian jobs of people who serve in the military. Two of its rules sit at the center of the dispute. One is the so-called escalator principle: a returning service member is owed the job they would have climbed into had they never left, not simply one with a matching title. The other is a protected window after coming back - a worker brought back after a longer stint of service generally can't be fired without cause for a year, and for 180 days after a shorter stint. The filing also brings a claim under a Kansas law barring discrimination over military membership.
The allegations have not been tested, and no court has ruled on the claims. The account above reflects one side of the dispute as set out in the complaint.
