You are 100% correct.
It is not professional to lie, either to a customer or an employee.
It is not necessarily the case, though, that anyone has lied just because an outage was staffed without inviting all the returnees.
It would take a lot of unnecessary effort to do what most people suspect that the office is doing.
More likely, the recruiter stacked a pile of resumes together for some outage and submitted them. When they are approved, they probably don't get sent out again to other outages happening at the same time.
In the current climate, Bartlett et. al. have to package outages in a way that ensures all the bases are covered. So, a lot of names submitted to the plant where you thought you were going are the names of techs who are going there directly from another job.
So, you can't go to Clinton after having been there for 8 straight outages. Why? Because it was staffed with the people who worked Byron or LaSalle right before. There is no subterfuge there. It is simple resource management. A recruiter had to staff both jobs. The are scheduled in sequence. It is simple. The customer buys off on it, the techs agree to it.
Then, along comes someone who can't understand why his name isn't on the list for Clinton, although he flat-out refused to do Byron, Dresden, LaSalle, Braidwood, and Quad Cities. No, nobody lied to him or to Exelon. They just put together a staff of techs who could do all the jobs in order and he wasn't one of them.
You really have to stretch the imagination to think that someone in the office is trying to reward or punish you. They, like anybody else, just want to do their jobs with as little effort as possible. If you can staff two, or three, or four outages in a row with one list, it saves you a lot of work. Once we can see that, it is easier for us to understand why things are the way they are and it is easier for us to get with the program, so to speak.