Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

We at Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP currently represent a client who was terminated in the midst of her "maternity" leave. The offending company employs less than 50 employees, so it (and she) are not "covered" by the Family and Medical Leave Act, hence the quotation marks. She is entitled to take the same disability leave that all employees are allowed, as a post-partum pregnancy leave is indeed a "disability," albeit a transient and "healthy" one, but this company decided to terminate her within two weeks of her leave, indicating that they could not "wait" the full 6 weeks for her to return to work.

As she was a single mother whose 25K per annum position was all that separated her from full-blown impoverishment, her joblessness with a nursing baby not yet 1-month old left her homeless inside of a 12 weeks, coincidentally, the same time period allotted under the FMLA for women who have borne or adopted a child. Her homelessness then rendered her incapable of finding suitable alternative employment, as even if she could seek another position without email, a permanent address or even appropriate bathing and dressing facilities within which to prepare for a job interview, it was beyond challenging to find someone reliable to babysit in the NYC shelter system. Now, approximately 10 months since her firing, she is still homeless and unemployed but beginning to pick up the pieces as she is imminently poised to move into a permanent, city-assisted housing unit.

We are currently prosecuting this matter at the administrative level and will be filing a court complaint shortly. While our college-educated client would be happy to share her experiences with the readers, it is an unfortunate reality that too often, working women bearing children are discriminated against and terminated from gainful employment simply as a result of the choice to bear children, a common occurrence that inordinately befalls inner city single women with little or no safety net.

It would serve us all, and the children we ostensibly care so much about in our-no- child-left-behind culture of wishful thinking, if the spirit and intent of the "human rights" laws were applied in practice to the protection of pregnant women in the workplace. The following pages are informational regarding the scope of coverage for women facing differential treatment on the basis of pregnancy in NY and its environs (please click on the images to access the original size).