06th May 2008
The Miscarriage Email
I wasn’t going to post this link, but I’ve seen it three or four workplace blogs, and it seems now that I’m deliberately not posting it, which really wasn’t my intention. Basically, an attorney was laid off promptly after having a miscarriage, and rather than signing an agreement not to talk about it in exchange for three months salary, she refused, and sent her email to everyone under the sun to expose the callousness of her employer.
A number of points aren’t clear in the email, but it does raise issues about how we deal with the tragedies in the lives of coworkers. If a coworker tells you she has a miscarriage, you need to express sympathy. Many people compare a miscarriage to the death of a child, including in support group structure, and while I won’t do that, it is just that big for many of us.
While certainly words of sympathy would have been a kindness and the individuals mentioned in the email might have been coldhearted, I fail to see that an employer has a duty to not lay her off as planned because she had a miscarriage. Are they to do that for all employees who are having personal problems at the moment? I’m sure it was a bad time for the others who were laid off (which was sort of unclear but it did seem like a planned, mass layoff to me…) It just read to me like she was expecting special treatment.
I just feel like this is not the whole story.
Oh, I didn’t read it that way. I guess I saw two parts:
a. coworkers were not able to express any sympathy (never mind empathy, just sympathy), and this hurt her, which isn’t illegal; and
b. then she was laid-off quickly so that she didn’t become pregnant again and have a case for pregnancy discrimination, which also isn’t illegal as far as my non-lawyer mind can take it, but is asshole-ish. There’s a fair amount of speculation in comments about legalities though, and it seems that not all lawyer opinions agree.
I read about it and I think that while she found a. upsetting, b. was more her main point. From what I read, it didn’t seem like they really planned to fire her beforehand. It seems like once they realized she had a miscarriage, they fired her so that they wouldn’t have to have a pregnant woman working for them, or that they perhaps tried to set up a good reason to fire her while she was pregnant, but “conveniently” for them, she had a miscarriage so that could fire her without worrying about pregnancy discrimination. I think it would have appeared less shady if they hadn’t asked her to sign the non-disclosure agreement, but for me, that is a good indication that they knew what they were doing was, at the least, shady, if not illegal. I will be interested to see how it goes. It seems very shady and nasty. Grrr. So many ruthless people out there. You would think that it wouldn’t shock me anymore, but it still leaves me shocked sometimes….
Non-disclosure agreements are pretty common during layoffs. I didn’t get the feeling she was asked to sign a statement that she wasn’t going to talk about the miscarriage issue but that she wouldn’t reveal company secrets.
I don’t know what is going on here but I got the feeling that this was all planned regardless of the miscarriage.
A lot of this is open to interpretation I guess. Either way, she has shitty coworkers.
Most men simply do not understand the painful aftermath of miscarriage unless they have seen their wife, girlfriend, sister, or close personal female friend go through it. It’s usually an inadvertent response that occasionally makes itself plain in inappropriate ways, such as this one.
I’m not as suspicious of the non-disclosure as I could be. I sign them with every client, and at most workplaces. It does seem to me that her lay-off was probably planned, as she received the lackluster review, and that often precedes a planned lay-off. But most of what I read in the email ha less to do with the legalities and with her sense of betrayal by people she liked and cared for.