About nine months ago, as it became obvious that I was With Child to even the most absent-minded professors in my engineering research center, I had the following conversation about two or three times a day:
Nervous Graduate Student: So, um, when are you going out on maternity leave?
(I wrangle all of the ~50 graduate students ‘round these parts.)
Me: Well, my due date is March 7th, but since [university name redacted] doesn’t have maternity leave, I’m going to be working as long as I can right up until then.
NGS: Wow. Really?
Me: Well, it’s not like I’m doing any heavy lifting, and I’d be sitting at a computer at home anyway, so yeah.
NGS: No, I meant the part about [redacted] not having maternity leave.
Me: Yeah, it sucks. I’ll be taking all of the annual and sick leave I’ve saved up for the past five years instead, and that’s about two and a half months’ worth. But don’t worry; I’ll be checking my email from home and [Ridiculously Competent Assistant] will be able to help you with anything in my absence.
At this point, the male students would nod and go on about their days, and the female grad students would stick around in an increasingly panicked state to ask about that whole saving annual and sick leave thing, since their contracts don’t include leave. The foreign grad students were particularly dismayed to hear that the United States doesn’t have paid federal family leave but instead makes do with something called the Family Medical Leave Act (or FMLA, for us acronym-obsessed HR types.) It’s unpaid leave for up to twelve workweeks in a twelve-month for qualified* employees at qualified** companies for qualified*** family medical circumstances. As per the law, employees can use accrued annual or sick leave “in accordance with the employer’s policy.”
That, as it turns out, is a major sticking point.
*
Because I compulsively over-plan everything, I had discussed the ins and outs of FMLA a few years prior with a coworker who was our department’s previous HR person. She’d told me that it was more of a job protection mechanism than anything else, and that employees could take sick, annual, or leave without pay as they saw fit, so long as their requests were approved. Armed with this information, I then spent the next several years carefully hoarding leave. It took a while longer than anticipated to get knocked up, but the silver lining was that I had lots of paid time off. Or so I thought.
Just to be on the safe side, I called our Human Resources liaison six weeks before my due date to make sure that I understood the FMLA process thoroughly. I’d worked with her before and was somewhat concerned about her lack of interest in the “human” part of HR, but everything I could see online seemed straightforward. She pointed me to a portion of the HR website with links to several forms and told me to fill out the request form when I wanted to take FMLA. It indicated that I could take sick and annual leave so long as I had enough accrued, and that I “may be required to provide proof of medical or qualifying exigency certification.” Since the proof of both medical and qualifying exigency was preventing me from sitting closer than a foot from my desk, I figured the hard part would be having the kid, right?
Thanks to the wonders of modern epidural technology, fourteen hours of labor wasn’t that bad. The net result was the most wonderful baby ever to be born, especially since she showed up five days early. I did, as promised, manage to work right up to my due date, which meant that I wobbled into the office five days later with a Proof of Birth form in hand and filled out the required form, checking the box indicating that I wanted to take sick and annual leave concurrently with my FMLA. My coworkers then shooed me home, assuring me that everything would be fine.
Early the next week, I called the HR liaison to check on the status of my paperwork and to figure out exactly how to report my leave—did I report annual or sick first? We then had the following conversation, which I have transcribed here to the best of my memory:
HRL: Oh, you can’t take sick leave during FMLA after childbirth.
Me: Say what now?
HRL: FMLA after childbirth is for bonding with your baby. You’ll need to take annual leave for that.
Me: Um, I’m still having trouble walking, and I’m crying for no discernible reason every fifteen minutes or so. I just went through a major medical event. Why can’t I use sick leave?
HRL: You’re changing your story! You said that you were taking leave to care for your baby!
Me: No, the story has stayed the same: I had a baby, and now I am taking care of both of us. The FMLA form says that I can take sick and annual leave so long as I have enough accrued. I have two and a half months of leave between them. Why can’t I use my accrued sick leave?
HRL: Please read the form again.
Me: I’m reading the form, and I don’t see anything on here about restrictions on sick leave.
HRL: Well, that’s [redacted] policy.
At this point, I began to cry for a very discernible reason and realized that I was now sitting on the kitchen floor.
Me: I spoke to you six weeks ago and asked about the FMLA process. You didn’t say anything about this policy at that time.
HRL: You didn’t ask about leave! Why didn’t you ask your department HR person?
Me: That would be me.
HRL: Oh. Well, please read the form again.
Me: Please, I have spent five years saving up sick and annual leave so that I could take as much paid time as possible off after having a child. If I can only take annual leave, that means I only have six weeks. Please. Is there anything you can do?
HRL: I’m sorry, but that’s the policy.
Me (attempting to retain some vestige of professionalism): Thank you.
I sat on the kitchen floor and cried as quietly as possible so as not to wake my daughter. All I could think was that it had already been a week and a half since she had been born, and I absolutely could not leave her at day care four and a half weeks from then. I don’t know how to describe the overwhelming sense of panic and misery, other than that it felt like a scream inside my head: DON’T MAKE ME LEAVE MY BABY. I had spent years commiserating with people online about FMLA issues, but I never once thought I would be among them. Right then and there, on my kitchen floor, I understood with absolute clarity why women quit their jobs after having kids. I will never, ever question it again.
In contrast, here’s how my husband’s request for FMLA paternity leave went earlier the same week:
Mr. W: Hi, [Competent HR Person.] Here’s my Proof of Birth form as backup for the FMLA paperwork.
CHRP: Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve already filed it for you, and you’re good to go for the next month. Do you have any pictures of the little darlin’? Goodness, she is so cute!
*who have been working full-time for a year or longer at a qualified company
**employs fifty or more people
***to care for oneself or an immediate family member due to extended illness, injury, childbirth, or the adoption of a child
After about fifteen minutes or so of crying into my bathrobe sleeve, I slammed into HR Wrangler mode. There was a law, it had been passed back when Kurt Cobain was still alive, goddammit, and I was going to make sure that [redacted] gave me whatever pathetic protection it afforded. I went back to the HR FMLA site, which still contained a list of forms and nothing more. I then reviewed the Department of Labor FMLA page, which is where I found the clause about employer policy regarding taking paid leave. Just for the hell of it, I Googled “FMLA [redacted] policy” and guess what popped up? An unlinked FMLA policy page.
I then scoured said unlinked FMLA policy page for any mention of restrictions on leave during FMLA. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t any. Instead, there are several descriptions of what leave can be used, and under what circumstances. An employee may indeed take annual leave after a child is born; sick leave may be used for a “serious medical condition” such as “pregnancy or prenatal care,” though crucially not recovery from childbirth. I believe the technical term for this sort of verbiage is “slicker than snake shit.”
I also noticed a line at the very bottom of the FMLA request form. It said, “I have reviewed this document and verify that the information provided or attached is correct. I have read and understood the FMLA policy. (add link)”
Yes, my fine employer had put a draft form up on their HR website. They had never updated it to include a working link to the evasive and disingenuous FMLA leave policy. This lack of attention to something so basic accurately summarizes the level of care and interest [redacted]’s HR department demonstrates towards employees who are severely ill or going through extremely stressful life events. I considered quitting on the spot.
What I decided to do instead, after a discussion with my husband, was to take the six paid weeks HRL had agreed that I could use, and then take the remaining six unpaid weeks as half-time leave without pay, stretched over three months. It would be tight, but we could manage.
Two months later, HR held a forum, chaired by HRL, to announce certain clarifications to [redacted]’s FMLA policy. The request form now includes a working link to the FMLA policy, which still does not openly state that employees cannot take sick leave for recovery from childbirth. Employees can now take sick leave for a maximum of three business days after “leaving a doctor’s care” after giving birth. “Leaving a doctor’s care” is synonymous with “leaving the hospital.” After that, any paid FMLA will need to be annual leave. Since [redacted] caps annual leave accrual at six weeks, that means that employees who cannot afford to take unpaid leave will only be able to take six weeks of family leave instead of their federally mandated twelve. HRL mentioned as an aside that “things would be a bit different for employees recovering from a C-section.” So generous.
You will be shocked to hear that the updated policy was developed in part by a man who does not have children. Due to my kid’s six-month doctor’s appointment, I was not able to attend the forum, which is probably why I still have a job and you haven’t read a national news report about someone stuffing a table up a coworker’s nose sideways.
The part I try to remember most of all is that I’m lucky. I have paid sick leave in the first place, and I work for an employer that qualifies for FMLA. Even when I was freaking out and sleep-deprived, I still knew enough to figure out what my legally guaranteed options were. My child care provider was flexible enough to work with my schedule if I’d needed to change it dramatically. This is not the case for a huge number of people in this country. This does not do a whole lot to make me feel better, on balance.
The takeaway from all of this: employers in the U.S. do not care about mothers of young children at all, unless we’re consumers of their products. It might be more accurate to say that they view us as horrible useless burdens who need to be ushered back to full-time work as swiftly as possible. They will do anything in their power to keep employees from exercising their federally guaranteed rights to twelve weeks of MOTHERFUCKING UNPAID LEAVE, up to and including forcing employees to give up paid sick leave. If you are planning on taking FMLA any time in the near future and you intend to use paid leave, double and triple-check your employer’s policy. Do not assume anything, or you may find yourself crying as if your heart would break while sitting on your kitchen floor with no idea how you got there.
Tags: academia, feminism, fmla, karen w., moms, parenting, politics, the united states only pretends to support mothers, work
Holy _shit_.
Haha, jinx, ish.
What. The. Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Oh god, this is so horrible I want to shove tables up noses for you.
I greatly appreciate it!
Ugh that’s awful, I had no idea things were that bad in the US. Could you have claimed you had post natal depression? Or does it not cover mental illnesses? Not that anyone should have to fake depression in order to get maternity leave.
In theory, FMLA covers anything that your doctor is willing to state that will prevent you from fulfilling your job duties. What I didn’t know (because nobody told me and the form was disingenuous as hell) was that a Proof of Birth statement was not sufficient for sick leave. If I had gotten an additional form filled out by my doctor, I could have taken sick leave. Since HRL was unwilling to provide even the most basic information in that regard, I didn’t figure this out until several months in.
I did wish at one point while sitting on my kitchen floor that I had had a C-section so that I would have a medical reason to stay home longer. Which I think summarizes the whole process perfectly.
Oh, I wouldn’t want to tell my place of work about postnatal depression even if I did have it, certainly not if I didn’t — talk about unforeseen job repercussions (all done in deniable ways of course).
This is the kind of thing I point to when people ask me if I want to go back to the States.
This is total bullshit. Just total bullshit. So sorry you had to go through this at such a challenging juncture.
If your office offers short-term disability (I know that’s a big IF for many people), you are supposed to be able to use that for 10-13 weeks after giving birth. It was a big help for me to extend my leave – but I was lucky to be working for a very family-friendly company at the time.
What I hate about short-term is that our company requires you use up ALL of your accrued leave before going on disability, so there’s absolutely no cushion of time left when you return to work after 12 weeks or what have you.
Would you believe me if I told you that my employer’s short-term disability program was even more confusing than its FMLA policy?
Oh man, I would totally believe you. My short-term disability application was fairly straightforward compared to most, and even then I needed a lot of help from our HR person (before and after giving birth) to fill out the paperwork and make sure it happened.
I absolutely can see how someone who is super-prepared and careful can still end up in this position, because something similar (not as extreme) happened to me. The utter relentless bullshittery of this is so maddening. What we do to new mothers in this country is barbaric.
Barbaric, that’s EXACTLY what it is.
Ugggghhhh, yes yes! A thousand times! My employer is relatively generous with what kind of leave you can use for childbirth (we have a paid time bank and a ‘short term disability’ bank – the short term disability [called STD bank, hahaha] accrues astoundingly slowly, such that I, who has been with the company five years, have 3 weeks saved up – the paid time bank accrues quickly but caps at 4 weeks), and even then, it is hideous is comparison to almost any other industrialized nation. And then the country as a whole acts SUPER SURPRISED when women end up forced out of jobs due to childbirth (usually while snidely saying ‘well they CHOSE to have babies, didn’t they?’) and that isn’t even getting into if you have complications or need accommodations during pregnancy or godforbid you have a sick kid that needs to be run around to lots of medical people in their new life.
Or just normal life crap like 10 week post-partum you need your appendix out so you can choose between taking a bunch of unpaid leave or losing your job (or just both! ugghhhhh).
You probably know this but for others: this is one way a union can be handy. Even/esp at a university, even/esp for faculty & professional staff. We made family leave a key part of bargaining and it substantially improved both the policy and its clarity. Also, I am so sorry.
This is one of the Halloween horror stories, right?
God, if only.
Look, my country isn’t perfect. We have our own shit going on.
But America’s policy makers need to realise that pretty much every other western country has:
– Free or affordable medical care
– Paid maternity leave (of varying lengths) AND paid paternity leave (shorter)
– Benefits for those who are unfortunate enough to be out of work or unable to work that are *supposed* to fund a basic cost of living.
These are simply fair and reasonable things to offer your citizens. They are paid for out of your own taxes. They say to the people who live in your country ‘you work to help us, so here: we will do our best to help you when you need it’.
They’re never perfect, and they’re mired in beaurocratic red tape, and I could spend HOURS complaiging about ATOS and the rules about disability benefits. But they exist.
I am so, so sorry that you were treated like this.
THIS is how you leave a “my country has basic legal protections for women” post. This one. This is a good way to do it.
Wish I could like this comment more than once.
I’m just horrified, reading this post. They seem like such basic rights. Karen, I’m so sorry this happened to you.
Making paternity leave as long as maternity leave reduces an employer’s incentive to discriminate in the hiring process.
Fuck this shit.
I mean. I know there are a lot of important things to say, but fuck this shit is the best I can come up with after reading this because seriously. Fuck this shit.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK EVEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRYYYYYTHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG
whoops I broke the margins
(don’t say it nicole don’t say it they already know)
SPEAKING AS A CANADIAN, THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? Like, when it’s all “Finland does x!” you can be “Finland has four people in it” but literally every other country, including Canada, manages not to be totally useless on this front AND doesn’t subject its citizens to endless fake-fellating of the IDEA of motherhood.
Like, I know I say this a ton, but Angela Merkel’s husband doesn’t have to cough up a stupid cookie recipe to Good Housekeeping during election season like it’s 1908, and yet the Germans manage to substantively support families. It’s the stupid hypocritical apple pie nonsense and children are our most precious blah blah and the fetuses 24/7 in the public discourse, with NOTHING to prop it up in terms of paid leave.
One of the most profound things I ever heard was George Carlin saying, “if you’re Preborn, you’re fine; if you’re Preschool, you’re fucked.” Conservative culture doesn’t ACTUALLY care about the wellbeing of children, because if they did we wouldn’t have women weeping on their kitchen floors because their corporate overlords refuse to let them take more than six weeks paid leave from work.
the worst is that they’re totally connected. it is exactly the “benevolent” (not actually benevolent) sexism of “women are just so much more suited to caregiving,” and “mothers are selfless saints,” bullshit that lets us screw over actual real-life moms.
Because there’s no need to give concrete labor protections to someone who is only too happy to sacrifice her own well-being for the sheer joy of being a mother.
As mad as Karen’s story made me, that’s how happy your comment made me. Like, the red finally fades from my vision and lo! my heart swells.
(although tbh i would totally read a Merkel family cookie recipe)
Yeah. Every time I, a long-term unemployed immigrant in Canada, start tentatively cheering at the prospect of going back to my homeland the U S and A and even being employed there (of course imagining that once we’re there we’ll be a member of the tiny Elect and not the Damned majority and be able to afford health care, as if that’s really in our hands), I read something like this and am like FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. At least Monsieur Siniichulok, the employed one, was able to take eight months of paid parental leave after the birth of our son. And his job is so miserable and he is so depressed at it that he’ll most likely be able to take a month or several of paid leave due to depression. It’s just like, yo Scylla, this is Charybdis. Who’s worse? I dunno, duke it out or something. But just..ow. I could not even have gone back to work at 12 weeks. I was sleepless,still bleeding, and trying to convince myself not to jump off our 16th-floor balcony. Something has to change in the United States.
Oh my god, this is horrifying, if not completely unsurprising. I’m so sorry you had to go through this, but thank you so much for sharing, I’m sure there are plenty of women reading this who are now thoroughly warned as to exactly how much maddening bullshit they might have to suffer after having a baby.
My employer (also a university, though I’m staff) also doesn’t let you use sick time for FMLA after childbirth. The distinction is because while FMLA is often used for maternity leave in the US, it’s not *just* about maternity leave. It’s also for people who have serious medical conditions. At my work, those people can use sick time. That’s why it might be unclear.
But yeah, it’s still shitty and unreasonable and not nearly enough time. And also, fuck you unpaid leave. You do me and my bills no good!
this is so insane because my employer [academic institution but not a university] MAKES you use sick time for FMLA (end result, end of maternity leave with NO sick time, which seems not very smart?)
Pshhhhh why would you need sick time with a newborn at home/in childcare? CRAZY TALK. Everyone knows that having a baby makes you immune to all illness for the rest of the calendar year.
Interesting (though dispiriting) that this may be a Thing for universities.
It definitely is. Universities do NOT want you to have babies if you are an employee. I think it has to do with the fact that nobody is entirely perfectly replaceable (even though in the end everybody IS replaceable, you know, the world does not rest on our shoulders!). But it *feels* like no one is replaceable because we all have different specialties. That and the academic year/schedules are pretty inflexible because of students.
The creepy part is that people are even acculturated to be suspicious of women of childbearing age as colleagues, EVEN WHEN IT DOESN’T IMPACT THEM personally — there is a judge and suspicious atmosphere very very often. I’m right in those years, even though no plans to child bear as of now, and it is just terrible.
Edit: I just realized you were the author o the article! So you know all about it. So sorry for your crap-eriffic experience, and thank you for giving the rest of us an early warning of what may be to come.
FLAMES. My GOD, that is horrible. Your last paragraph is righteous.
I worked for a company that qualified me for FMLA. They had no other maternity leave. I hoarded PTO, planning to stretch that three months out a bit, and then noticed that our company handbook said you had to use all of your PTO “during” FMLA leave – so you’d still get 3 months, but get paid for a week or two of it, depending on how much vacation you had. Of course, you don’t accrue PTO during unpaid time off.
Wait, I asked HR. Isn’t this stupid? You ask mothers to return to work with no PTO accrued? What happens when their babies, tiny germ factories now presumably in daycare with other tiny germ factories, get sick? Blank faces. Ok.
I ended up taking my hoarded 2 weeks vacation prior to putting in for FMLA, which was probably only possible because we had no paid sick leave policy like you. And about a year later, I quit to mommy-track myself, I mean freelance, for various other reasons involving family-unfriendly company policy. I see so many other moms doing the same things, going through contortions to figure out how to care for their kids and stay in the job market. It’s absurd.
“Of course, you don’t accrue PTO during unpaid time off”
oho yes. I was told that I had to use up all PTO that would accrue up until the end of the year before I could start the 12 unpaid weeks (not even true) and they calculated the amount I would have without reference to the fact that accruals would actually stop for three months. so I ended up owing them money out of my last paycheck of the year because of the imaginary vacation I was forced to use.
now I am on my second FMLA experience & have learned enough about it to be taking intermittent leave, which is the thing to do if your condition or circumstance and colluding doctor will allow it. essentially, they can’t shut off the PTO tap unless you’re out for a whole pay period continuously. so, a week and a half of leave, a couple days of remote work, repeat, and you make just enough to keep your insurance premiums paid and the fractions of vacation days keep slowly coming in. it’s not a scam but it feels enough like one to make me feel a little better.
WHAT. You owed THEM money? FMLA is so messed up – I feel like companies have so many ways to game it to make it as difficult and confusing as possible.
this was not even company policy, it was an unspeakably dumb supervisor misrepresenting company policy for her own nefarious and/or stupid purposes. she was later fired, but not for that.
one thing I can blame on company policy is that when you’re on short-term disability, they don’t pay you for two weeks. I misunderstood this to mean that it took two weeks to process and then you got the retroactive payment later and you just had to budget for that delay, but no, no matter how easily it’s approved, they just don’t pay you for the first two weeks of whatever the total time is. but that is fine since all landlords are happy to be paid half rent that month.
[although while I’m hating my company I guess I should acknowledge that both my top-level bosses have been mothers of fairly young children. although it is possible that being assigned to run our office is a punishment detail and not a reward so I should not assume too much about what that means about company culture. anyway they are both very understanding and humane about other peoples’ medical problems and life issues so good for them.]
When I worked for the Park Service, I had a coworker who had just come back from maternity leave, and was basically in the hole on Sick Leave. You were allowed to use sick leave in advance of earning it, but then you had negative sick leave and had to earn it back at the same regular accrual rate, so if you actually got sick (or your kid did), it was either vacation time (I can’t recall if she used that during maternity leave or not) or leave without pay.
I just checked my company’s policy, because even though I am not currently in a position where I could have or would want to have a child, I would like to eventually and a friend of mine just came back from her maternity leave and I was curious.
“Family and Medical Leave:
•Eligible employees are entitled to a maximum twelve (12) week unpaid leave to provide care made necessary by: Birth or adoption of a child – or – Serious health condition of self or family member.
New Father Leave/Maternity Pay:
•“New” fathers entitled to a maximum five (5) days paid leave to assist with mother and baby care.
•“New” mothers entitled to a maximum five (5) days pay following the birth of the child.”
The scare quotes around the word ‘new’ really freak me out. I don’t know if my company’s policy is “good” or “bad” by US standards, but…this country needs some serious help in this department.
Are you only a “new” parent when it’s your first child?
5 days paid?! In what corner of anybody’s ignorant mind does that seem like a reasonable amount of time for such an event? And why is it the same for the father and mother? I mean I don’t want the father to have less time off to help, but the mother has legitimate medical issues and I would think she would need more time. Maybe I’m missing something, like the shrewd mindset of these policy makers.
Yes but it’s five days paid, PLUS twelve weeks unpaid. How very generous! Five extra days paid! Like a babycation! I’m surprised more people aren’t having babies just for the extra PTO, really.
Something I am struck by is the way that my own HR department made it sound like their policies were federal policies, but I am noticing that every institution seems to do things a little differently.
It sounds like you are forced to use all of your PTO during FMLA time, and to take the rest unpaid. At my place of work, I am forced to use all my sick PTO but can elect to use or not use my vacation time, and the OP was restricted from using sick time, which is totally perverse (and sounds possibly illegal?)
This is just to say, that when my HR person told me I was forced to take out the sick time, but not necessarily vacation, she really made it sound like that was federal FMLA standards but it sounds like it’s NOT which makes the whole thing somehow even more infuriating.
Yes!! I think you’re exactly right, and it just adds to the confusion. You just hit this wall of “company policy,” and who even knows who made the judgment that PTO or vacation or nothing at all must be taken.
“Company policy” is the “States’ Rights” of the private sector.
THIS! This is exactly what I’ve had to do with both kids! You go out on FMLA, but you have to concurrently use up all of your PTO, so you return to work with zero saved up in the bank. It was especially awesome having my kids return to the babysitter’s at the height of late winter cold season.
Seriously. The majority of the reason I am Deeply Unsure about having kids is the lack of maternity leave at my company. We use that same FMLA policy. I have a ton of vacation time, but it would be useless since it would all get eaten up by FMLA. If a woman doesn’t have a baby in, say, October or November, I have no idea how they would make it to January 1 with no remaining vacation time.
So happy to a) be Canadian and c) work for a company that offers top-up. (Canada’s federal parental leave coverage caps at $514 per week, but good employers top that up to a reasonable percentage of your salary, though not usually for the full year.)
Jeez louise, I work at a Canadian non-profit, and I make less than $514 per week. Where do you work? Let me come join you.
(Fuck, I sound like the photonegative of one of those “I make $750287621od18u dollars working from HOOOOOME” ads.)
(( Double fuck, I need a good cry. ))
I have a theatre degree so I did arts admin and non-profit work for years and years, I feel you. Now I’m a public servant. It’s a bit soul-destroying, and they are slashing and cutting and freezing our salaries/benefits/etc but I can always recall making $12 an hour and never going to the dentist for context.
I’m stuck on $12 an hour as the negative hell-job you left.
Maybe you have work you care about? Total sympathy for you and your teeth.
Minimum wage is $10.75 here
My comment wasn’t meant to be snippy at you, and I feel like it might have come off that way. I’m just trying to imagine $12/hr being terrible pay, when it’s the federal living wage in the US.
In other news, labor standards in the US are fucked.
but “living wage” means “terrible pay”! “living wage” is the lowest you can possible make and still hope to pay for the bare essentials. It doesn’t include enough to save, to pay back debt, to travel, to have a child. Minimum wage is usually even lower than that because governments like to assume that you’re a student when you make minimum wage and have parental support, student loans, etc, which isn’t always true, of course. (and even in instances where it is, wouldn’t it be better for public health if students could afford to eat fresh produce instead of ramen all the time?)
I didn’t think you were being snippy, I thought you were complaining about being paid $12 an hour, which is a fair complaint!
I work for a shitty-ass Canadian company and make $11 per hour while trying to avoid killing anyone. Fuck this
I get so goddamn angry when people do the “well, they CHOSE to have babies” thing — and I don’t even have kids! It’s just so fucking perverse. Having children is a basic human experience! Some people choose not to, but it should be considered pretty standard-issue for the species. Children aren’t luxury goods, and they aren’t hobbies that people should be expected to squeeze in when it doesn’t interfere with their jobs.
I don’t understand how liberals in particular are so ready to jump down people’s throats when they say “I shouldn’t have to pay for your birth control because you can CHOOSE not to have sex,” but largely so unconcerned about “I shouldn’t have to cover your leave of absence because you can CHOOSE not to have kids.” I feel like it’s the same thing, essentially: of course you *can* choose not to do either of those things, and in some cases that may be the very best choice for you! Rich tapestry! But we need to just assume that *most people* are not going to volunteer for lifelong celibacy or childlessness and not refer to those as though they’re the standard from which you have to justify your deviation.
Yes, this. I generally find it very frustrating when people treat individual women’s reproductive choices as decisions that should be based solely on society’s perceived demographic needs. Like: Earth is overpopulated, so it’s selfish of you to be having a child and I shouldn’t have to subsidize that. This kind of thinking is wrongheaded to begin with; slowing population growth is about increasing gender equality, health, and economic opportunity in developing countries, and thus reducing the number of women who don’t have access to fertility control or education, not about making it as hard as possible for women in wealthy countries to have even one child and continue to participate in society. And this kind of “your uterus is the origin of macro trends in population” thinking veers into really terrible territory so fast. Like: Europe has below-replacement fertility and letting in more Muslims is not the answer, so have more kids/we need more white babies so the brown people don’t take over America/we need wealthy, educated women to have babies so the poor, who breed like rabbits, don’t overrun us. Or Disingenuous Anti-Choice Argument #438: A greater proportion of black women terminate pregnancies, so terminating your pregnancy as a black woman is participation in black genocide.
My standard response to that line of bullshit: “Say hello to your mother for me.”
I do have some grumpy stuff to say about my decades working in the family business, but I sit back in gratitude like every week still because I never had to worry about this stuff. I made policies good for all the moms, and sure it was initially self-serving, but I wasn’t the only one bringing my babies to work for months after leave was up. We didn’t get paid maternity leave, though. Even if it was so Daddy’s Little Girls can stay home with the grandbabies, that was too outside the American norm.
(A+ use of Kurt Cobain as time-passing marker!)
Oh god, I had total deja vu reading this and then wondered if maybe you were ME because it all sounds so spookily familiar. Except at my [world renowned institution] place of work, you are forced to take all accrued sick leave during FMLA time. Which makes perfect sense, right? because it’s not like babies ever get sick or anything later in their first year of life. So out of those measly 12 weeks, you have to paid out all sick time, and the rest is unpaid unless you have accrued vacation time you would like to use as well.
Even at the beginning of my pregnancy I thought “shit, there’s no way I’m working the last month of pregnancy” but now at 36 weeks I am thinking, “Well, I will work until I go into labor because there is no way I am losing any time WITH my baby”
I think I will only have about 5 weeks of paid time. My plan right now is to take 10 weeks straight and then stretch the remaining ten days of leave over five weeks so I can transition back into work T-Th. Does this sound sane? Anyone else have any suggestions or advice?
Also can we talk about what a joke it is to expect deeply pregnant women to do the same quality of work as before? I am being paid to take bathroom breaks every 15 minutes and the rest of the time my mind is deeply distracted. But I show up!
I kept having to take breaks during this read to let the red clear from my eyes and the little voice in my head screaming “SUE THEM” quiet down. As if legal action would help, not like this country’s judicial system has done a whole lot to help women lately. I’m really sorry about everything and I hope you and your family can achieve a comfortable work-life balance despite the broken system.
My company recently changed its vacation day policy so that you cannot carry over vacation time from year to year, and we don’t have “sick time,” you’re allowed to telecommute as much as you need within reasonable limits. And I think you get like… 3 weeks maternity or paternity leave. So that leaves no way to accrue any additional leave. Having never been pregnant, I don’t know how draconian they are about this kind of thing, but the utter lack of moms at the company gives me some idea.
As an employee of [name of ostensibly prestigious institution of higher learning with moronic, poorly documented HR policies that are administered by idiots redacted], I feel you. Good luck. Try not to murder anyone.
And I just spent a lot of time researching the maternity leave policy at my company, and now I’m horribly confused. The language is all so vague. But I’m scared to ask for clarification because of the implications. Urgh
I have put absolutely no thought into any of this, and I am probably about 3+ years from even starting to think about kids and now I feel woefully behind in preparation and purposeful leave accrual. 0_0
Samesies. I’ve just reached the point in my life where I’m like “OK the thought of having a baby say, 5 years from now, no longer sends me into fits of hysterical laughter. Apparently I need to start planning for maternity leave RIGHT NOW”.
Yep. Just calculated how many weeks what I have now will get me and I want to cry. Here’s hoping my husband still works from home when we want to have a baby.
I am still only 23.5 weeks pregnant, and I am ALREADY having motherfucking agita over maternity leave and FMLA. And this is my third freaking kid.
Byzantine and preposterous HR policies that do nothing to foster an employee feeling safe, shame mothers, require a return to work at the six week mark (?!!!??), and make people feel stupid on top of it?
FUCK
THAT
NOISE
My wife gets paid leave that doesn’t distinguish between annual and sick; it’s all just paid time off. But it also is capped at 30 days, which she’s been hoarding like a miser since she started work (she basically can’t take more than, I think, five days off during the year; she’s a teacher, so she has the summers, but five days over nine moths still isn’t a lot).
A lot of the women at her school try to plan their pregnancies so that their babies are due in May, so they can take their 30 days and then have the summers, but…you know, best laid plans.
Here in America we love children and families. Just not as much as we hate freeloaders, I guess. And who is a bigger freeloader than a baby?
My dad asked if I’d given any thoughts to when I want to have kids, and I said, “Late April 2018 or 2019.” He was surprised by the specificity, but I was like, “Well, if I’m in this same job, and I time it jusssst right I can either not work in the summer or work my very reduced summer hours right after my leave runs out.” (Also, I’m a planner, he knows this, don’t be so surprised dad.)
My sister is a tenure-track professor at a top liberal arts college, and I think she’d like to have a kid at some point soon. However, it sets her career back to take leave in the middle of a semester just when she’s trying to make her tenure case look good. And, as you said, planning a pregnancy so the baby’s due in May is not always in the cards.
How do we make those baby freeloaders into profit centers? I’d love to see that business plan… (hmm)
Man, there’s got to be SOME way to monetize babies? Could…could they pull something? Like if you lashed a bunch of them together, could they like turn a winch?
Good idea. And if they can’t turn a winch, they can at least participate in mandatory online advertising to generate pageviews.
I failed to find a photo of babies pulling a winch but I did find a picture of this very proud mama dog pulling a cart full of baby dogs and that is helping me get through the rageness of this post.
Well that is all right.
Lord knows something has to be.
(Lookit those puppies!)
One of my friends had a baby mid-semester and on her teaching evals, someone wrote, “She had a baby in April. This was very poor planning.”
Jesus. I’ve been complaining because I work for the US government and our policies are appalling – we get no paid maternity leave and the bare minimum FMLA, although at least we can use sick leave. We accumulate it pretty slowly for the first few years though, and since I started out as a contractor before being made a Fed, I have basically none. But I do get lots of deparment-wide emails detailing how I should be taking my work-life balance more seriously!
I complained once to my (male, childless) boss and got a lecture about how terrible it was when he worked in Finland, because “those people” would have their children back-to-back and get YEARS off, and how was any work going to get done? It’s so difficult being a white man in charge of things, sometimes! (FLAMES)
Elizabeth, do you not work at an agency with Leave Bank? If not, maybe think about moving to a place that has it. When I had my baby, I got 6 weeks paid from Leave Bank, and then I got 12 weeks unpaid leave that I used mostly intermittently throughout my son’s first year of life. It was still shitty when judged on the global scale, but good on the American scale.
I came here to comment, not only to add my support, but also to say the gif in the story is CleverManka-level perfect. And now I can meta-comment on your perfect gif comment as well. A+ all around.
You have no idea how much I needed that little bit of friendly recognition today. Thank you.
Seriously, though, I’m looking at possibly taking some serious Time Off Work for health issues, maybe (hence the needing friendly words right now), and this story enrages and terrifies me in equal amounts.
Friendly words I have in spades! 🙂 But I rely on you for the gifs.
Seriously though, I hope you can get the time off you need, or, failing that, some other source of help and comfort. No one should have to sacrifice well-being for a paycheck.
This is particularly appropriate given that the way I manage to deal with all of this is to imagine myself as the Alien Queen.
Also, *fistbump* fellow graduate-student wrangler!
I think this may be the only answer. I cannot think how you could change the system you have, as there doesn’t seem to be any way for The People to effect change. Your entire political process is designed to preserve the status quo, and to disenfranchise the voting public.
Due to overexposure to the internet, I read every “FMLA” as “Fuck My Life (Aaaa)” and it seems like a perfectly legitimate interpretation.
I read Fuck My Life in the Ass
Fuck My LIFE ALREADY
Oh my goddddddd–off to read my company’s policy. We got bought out a year ago and I have literally no idea what the new company’s policy is at all.
“Leaving the ‘Human’ out of ‘Human Resources’,” indeed. Your Human Resource person should be written up for this. You called her in advance and asked her for advice, and she led you to believe everything was fine. She nodded and smiled and failed to explain the full story. It’s her job to not just answer the exact question put to her, but to anticipate other needs you might have.
Every HR person I’ve ever met has been an insufferable asshole along these lines, and I don’t understand how they get away with it.
Yes your HR person sounds like a total asshole! Does she have a superior you can report her to?
She got promoted to the superior position while I was out. I don’t know of a better example of the Peter Principle.
Oh fuck that noise! Your company sounds like my old place of work; “[REDACTED CO NAME], doing the absolute least for employees and the work-life balance since 1987!”
Truth be told, I’m not even certain she smiled while doing it.
Human Resources wouldn’t be called that if their goal wasn’t to strip mine us.
As a fellow HR/ FMLA administrator do they have that policy in writing? If not, take it over her head. The federal forms clearly state you are allowed to take sick time and birth is certainly a major medical event. If they do have it in writing, you should have your doctor fill out a medical certification that states you need the time off to recover from a major medical event. He doesn’t have to specify what that is. Also, rule number 2 of HR is ‘don’t fuck with pregnant or recently pregnant people.’
The problem is that by the time I figured out that I needed my doctor’s certification (rather than just a proof of birth form) to use sick leave, it was past the point where I could have taken sick leave. And it is *still* not in writing to this day, other than the careful dancing around I mention in the post.
But yes, don’t fuck with recently pregnant people, because you can bet your ass that everyone in my department will be able to take every red cent of paid leave possible from now until the end of time.
HEY GIRL HEYYYY LET’S BURN IT DOWN TOGETHER. I was back at work exactly one month after giving birth because as a substitute employee, I don’t qualify for sick leave. So I got a month off, and celebrated Tate’s one-month birthday by hiking my dress up to my chin to pump in a strange office. Oh, and crying.
As an employee of a federal agencey, we have our annual leave capped at 6 weeks, but sick leave accrues forever -which, great if you’re on maternity leave, right? NOPE. You can only use 6 weeks of your sick leave (even if you have 7 or 12 or 25) for maternity leave. I was flabbergasted when I heard this. Twelve weeks max! It’s completely nuts and infuriating. This country needs a major overhaul on these policies. Perhaps those “pro-life” organizations could focus on this instead of harrassing women outside of clinics? Maybe? no? of course not.
WHAT? this makes zero sense!!
So sorry you had to go through this, thank you so much for sharing your story.
And, hello, one of the key reasons why my child will be an only. Here’s what happened –
When I got pregnant with my daughter, I was teaching and had a nine-month contract. Happily, I managed to time things in such a way that she was born right as my contract was ending for summer break. Boom – 3.5 months home with new baby, no need to use leave, nothing. Unhappily, and unrelated, I lost my job during that summer (oh, the thrill of getting axed while your ten-week-old is sitting in a bouncy chair next to you and you’re the one whose salary covers the family’s health insurance). But one of my supervisors (fighter of the good fight) arranged things in such a fashion that they were contractually obligated to keep me on for a calendar year after I was let go (I will not explain, but it makes bizarre, bureaucratic sense, I swear). My benefits continued, my pay continued, and my responsibilities disappeared, all of which meant I got to stay at home with my daughter for another three months, until I got another position elsewhere and was free of that nightmare.
So let me break this down – I got nearly seven months at home with my kid, but, to do that, I had to time everything exactly right, get bloody fired, and look for another job. One baby, because there is no way things will ever line up like that again, NOR DO I WANT THEM TO, and because I refuse to pretend like going back to work after three months of unpaid leave is okay and possible for me.
In other words, solidarity in the struggle, moms and moms-to-be.
And naturally, the husband is happily given time off to heroically bond with his offspring, because it’s just so astonishingly wonderful when men do that, and we should go out of our way to make sure it’s as easy as possible for them.
And yet I talked to someone on Twitter who was written up for taking five weeks of unpaid leave–seven fewer than he was legally entitled to–after the birth of his kid.
I am the last person to say “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?!?” but fathers really do get fucked over even more in the U.S., if such a thing is possible.
Wait, what? That makes the opposite of sense.
You may have noticed that a lot of things having to do with FMLA make the opposite of sense.
This whole situation combines some of my absolute most-hated things: bureaucratic robot-people who take pleasure in your distress while parroting “please read the forms”; hideous double standards; the absolute NERVE of companies who WILFULLY MISLEAD and DELIBERATELY WRANGLE their employees out of their BASIC RIGHTS; and hnnnggggggg I have to go and lie down now, so I can only imagine how you felt while living this whole nightmare. Well done for not quitting on the spot.
I really admire the restraint you’ve shown while dealing with these horrible people. I’d be burning down my career right about now by shoving tables up noses and putting my employer’s actions on blast to the entire world.
I cannot tell you what it takes not to forward a link to this post to HRL.
Glassdoor.com
Work at any big unionized employer in Canada and you’ll get this! I work at a major university and my employer tops up your salary to 100% during the 17-week maternity leave and then you are entitled to $514 or like 45% (whichever is more) for the remaining 35 weeks of the year. You also accrue vacation during mat leave.
I used to work at a non-profit and left even though I cared a ton about the cause because the pay/benefits were too shitty, which is, I guess, why everyone quits non-profits.
I’m not surprised and I feel awful for you. It’s all so fucking fucked.
Human resources = humans as resources (to be mined, processed, discarded).
Aww, that’s not very nice. There’s good ones and bad ones.
It was well-known (but unwritten) at my employer that you got a doctor’s note mandating that you needed however many weeks of sick leave you had saved up; that got us into “medical necessity” and was called “medical leave”, but it was all part of the cludge of maternity non-leave that went along with it. It was odd how every single mom at my work had to get x weeks of medical leave after birth!
That had a lot to do with us only having one child. Even though I changed employers, the whole ordeal, on top of the normal stress of having a kid, was more than we could go through again. It’s brutal.
Ladies; if you want kids, or want your kids to have kids, without going broke and insane, get your asses out and vote. Nothing changes if we do nothing.
In theory, FMLA covers anything that your doctor is willing to state that will prevent you from fulfilling your job duties. What I didn’t know (because nobody told me and the form was disingenuous as hell) was that a Proof of Birth statement was not sufficient for sick leave. If I had gotten an additional form filled out by my doctor, I could have taken sick leave. Since HRL was unwilling to provide even the most basic information in that regard, I didn’t figure this out until several months in.
I did wish at one point while sitting on my kitchen floor that I had had a C-section so that I would have a medical reason to stay home longer. Which I think summarizes the whole process perfectly.
Reply, why are you here and not where you’re supposed to be??
Thanks for adding this. I almost think it is worth putting it up above. Obviously, the number one lesson is that the American system is messed up but I think it is important that women know that they might be able to use paid sick leave if they take a good look at the employer’s sick leave policy and ask their doctor for a note indicating that they have a medical condition preventing them from working after you give birth.
Thanks for writing this piece!
The problem is that by the time I figured out that I needed my doctor’s certification (rather than just a proof of birth form) to use sick leave, it was past the point where I could have taken sick leave. And it is *still* not in writing to this day, other than the careful dancing around I mention in the post.
But yes, don’t fuck with recently pregnant people, because you can bet your ass that everyone in my department will be able to take every red cent of paid leave possible from now until the end of time.
*shakes tiny fist at commenting system*
whyyyyyyyyyy didn’t the HR person tell you you needed certification and give you the FMLA form for your doctor/midwife to fill out?!? And why are YOU forced to pay for this oversight instead of HR? I am enraged for you!
A cynical and suspicious person might conclude that she wanted me to burn annual leave (which is a liability on the balance sheet) rather than take sick leave.
I am so sorry you had to go through this, Karen. It’s good that you were able to find a way to get through it that was somewhat, sort of, slightly better than what was being pushed on you.
I’m feeling incredibly lucky. It’s still a few years till I’ll be thinking about maternity leave, but I have a chronic illness that got severe in Spring 2013. My workplace (NYC office of an international company) was pretty accommodating. I was on short term disability (STD; I laughed at that too, tenyaluna!) for 3 months last year, and for 1 month and then 5 more months this year. I received my full salary for a certain number of weeks, then a reduced salary the rest of the time I was out. It was not enough to live on (I used up my whole tax refund to stay afloat), but it was something. FMLA was somehow involved in the whole thing, but I’m not really sure how because the paperwork I had to do was simple and minimal, and the disability insurance company handling my case and paying me was fairly easy to work with. Oh, and apparently I also continued to accrue vacation days normally while I was on leave.
It all felt like the world’s-most-difficult-thing at the time, and my reduced income was not enough to live on (particularly for NYC), but after reading about everyone’s maternity experiences here, it sounds like a dream. The norm for maternity and sick leave should be BETTER than the experience I had, not the same as the ones that you all are/have been experiencing. It’s so depressing.
Well now I’m noticeably angry. Agreeing with so much of the above reactions and would like to add a general sentiment: it’s fucked that it’s even legal for employers to have such policies. I’m not surprised, treating human lives as commodities is rewarded in this hyper-capitalistic economy. But you would think that some employers would take it upon themselves to actually do what’s right (haha sympathetic employers) and not seek the least humane policies for profit’s sake. To be so wretched towards any new mother is unfathomable, do people not realize that they were given the gift of life from a birth that their mothers’ suffered and endured? Have a conversation with your mothers (alive or dead), you collectively disgraceful and ungrateful hoarders of wealth.
Ah, but see, their mothers were expemplars of motherhood who would make any sacrifice necessary with nary a peep of complaint. And either they put their precious children ahead of their career that could never possibly fulfill them as much as motherhood, or they were able to work a full time job and still have a home cooked meal on the table every night.
If you consider who controls a lot of the capital in the US, many of those people are of a generation and social class where their mothers didn’t have to worry about maternity leave, because their mothers didn’t work. Either they worked till they had kids and then quit to raise them, or they never worked.
Good points. True. I guess my thinking was along the lines of: we are all brought into this world through childbirth (duh), you would think that it would be respected as the major event it is and treated accordingly. But I was naive to forget how little the ruling class cares about women/people who need to work for a wage in order to survive.
Not to mention the presumption that Real Men make enough money for their wives to stay home and raise their children without any assistance, which wreaks havoc on any attempt to either take paternity leave or help out in any way with childcare.
Interestingly enough, it is *not* rewarded in this economy to treat employees like that.
Places like Costco and even QuikTrip, who treat their employees very well, do better than their skimping competitors. It’s almost as if treating your human resources as humans, rather than resources, pays off.
Weird, eh? http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/…
I almost feel guilty admitting in canada we get 1 year off. My employer, a hospital, pays your full pay minus what the government gives you. The next six months is government unemployment cheque essentially which is 60% of your pay to a max of $375 a week (which was difficult but doable with preplanning). And here I was resenting France for having 2 years maternity. How awful, I could never leave my baby so early!
What a nightmare! 12 weeks? That’s all you get? And then you need to leave your (still nursing?) infant to daycare or lose your job? What, do they hate children in your country? They must hate children.
(I am suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude over living in a country where parents get 480 days of paid parental leave for every child (twins: 660 days), job guaranteed.)
Oh my god, where do you live and how do I apply for citizenship?
If you’re lucky, they’ll give you a tiny room in which to bump breastmilk when you get back.
HAHAHA or you do it in a bathroom despite it being illegal because otherwise you cry with pain.
I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, and I want to move in with you, please.
Oh, I remember back when my gf was preggers and we were jealousy-googling mat leave in Europe. You’re in Sweden if I recall correctly?
Every single time I see the acronym FMLA over on Ask A Manager, I can’t help but read it in my head as “Fuck My Life, Augh”. That…seems pretty accurate still.
My lack of surprise or even a reasonable level of dismay at this situation is my evidence of how shitty the leave situation is here. My first reaction was, “did she really expect she could take off for more than six weeks? and get paid for any of it at all? how funny!” Because I just expect that everyone has as shitty a policy as I do (six weeks unpaid, to which you can apply your two weeks vacation, which doesn’t roll over, and so can never be more than two weeks).
Ug. So terrible.
I’ve been thinking about this comment for nearly a day now, and after a lot of consideration, I can tell you why I expected that I could take more than six weeks off. First, my employer’s FMLA request form said that I could. Second, pretty much every news article I’ve read for the past 15 years on this subject has said that Americans have to make do with FMLA supported by whatever paid sick or vacation time they’ve accrued, which led me to believe that that’s how FMLA worked: you took FMLA and used whatever paid leave you had available during that time. Ergo, if you had twelve weeks of leave saved, you could take twelve weeks. It wasn’t actual maternity leave, but at least it was something, right?
Ironically enough, the tendency to generalize from experience is actually what got me started on this whole topic. Several years ago, I helped my co-worker get some signatures on an FMLA request form for one of our faculty members who had just given birth. My center director called me into his office and said that she must have made a mistake on the form, as it indicated that she was going to take unpaid leave, and why on earth would she do that when all Americans got a full year paid maternity leave? After all, that’s what his daughter had gotten at her university.
(I realize you may have just expired from laughing so hard that all your innards exploded.)
Yeah, I totally get why you thought your leave would work out that way; it’s just that I expect everyone to be fucked even more thoroughly than that. Like, why can’t you just deliver in the break room, and then do some more filing? You can keep the baby in a drawer, and play with her during lunch. Assuming you’re caught up on all your work.
(We don’t even qualify for FMLA, so the six weeks unpaid is presented as a glorious gift from our benevolent masters (they could make us come back after our 40 hours of sick time is used up! but they are so nice they don’t do that). My baby came at 33 weeks, and I actually ended up taking 19 weeks off (unpaid! wooooo!) until she was big enough that her doctor felt she could survive the illnesses of daycare. I just sort of didn’t come back, and trusted that they wouldn’t want to deal with firing me, and they didn’t. I’ve been here ten years and am fairly good at my job, so I’m lucky in that way. We don’t have fancy things like an HR department or anything like that to intervene or provide forms or anything.)
I have never even heard of any American getting a year PAID! (Luckily, I’ve well met my out of pocket max for the year, so I can get my exploded innards treated. Assuming the innardologist is in network.) (And don’t get me started on insurance. Let’s burn things, shall we?)
My coworker actually did bring her son to the office for the first six weeks or so that she was back, as she couldn’t find a good daycare situation. I was a little trepidatious at first, but he was quiet and amenable most of the time and only made a fuss when he had a legit reason, which made him easier to deal with than most of our grad students and all of our faculty. Still. I’m glad your daughter is doing better now.
The innardologist’s assistant, however, will be out-of-network, so the additional explosion rider will apply and negate any and all in-network savings.
Burn ALL the things, I say.
“Things would be different were the employee recovering from a c-sectiin.” Jesus god.
I truly hope you come down with a lovely 6-week case of “pneumonia” and can stay home with your kiddo. I’m sure we can find a doctor to write that note!
(But seriously, this is SO INFURIATING. My company did allow me to use sick/annual leave in combination, but even a non-shitty US policy is still a shitty policy.)
Honestly? The people who set the standards for US maternity leave policy don’t believe women should be working outside the home. This is how they make that policy position into a reality. I’m lucky enough to work for a place that does offer 12 weeks of sort-of paid leave, and frankly? It’s not enough (I had a baby born 4 weeks early, but that doesn’t get you any “extra” leave, so I basically had to leave an 8-week old to go back to work). I’ve already kind of decided that I’m taking a year off if I have another kid, and they can fire me if they want. I’m also INCREDIBLY lucky that that’s even an option (it’ll be financially difficult, but not impossible, particularly if we don’t have to pay for childcare).
I worked up until two days before I gave birth, and was planning to work until my due date. I had contractions at work, and I work in a public space, so it’s not like I could go have a quiet lie-down in a cubicle or something.
I’m a substitute, so I don’t qualify for FMLA– I get 30 days of unpaid “don’t call me for work” days per year, so I used it all up, starting by e-mailing my boss from the L&D room to let him know that I had to start taking it that day and that I would be available in a month– two weeks before my doctor wanted to okay me for work. If I hadn’t had a doctor’s note certifying that I was physically ready to work at 30 days, I would have lost my job. (And unemployed librarians are a dime a dozen around here.) I’m incredibly lucky that both grandmas live within driving distance to help the transition, and the managers have been understanding that I turn down shifts, but I had to go back and take as many shifts as possible, I’d lost a month of income and had a kid who’d spent his first three days in the NICU, so he had a $40k hospital bill before he was a week old, and insurance only covers so much. People always look so appalled when I tell them I went back to work after a month, but what was I supposed to do? Be unemployed with giant medical and student debt in one of the most expensive cities in the country? (I will say that going back to work and talking to adults made a big difference in fighting my PPD. So did Zoloft.)
Oh honey. I had no idea.
I am available for nasal table stuffing here, too.
Exactly zero of my non-retail, non-work-study jobs have been required to comply with FMLA (50 employee threshold- pretty easy to miss in an industry where 4% of all firms have more than 50 employees, with, okay, 42% of people in the industry being employed by those firms). I am part of the forty percent (forty! FMLA covers less than 60%! of working adults!). But FMLA is “working”: http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/survey/FMLA_Survey_fa…
HR departments mostly exist to protect the company, not the employees. My husband was fired from his lab in [World Class State University] because I got pregnant and he took FMLA. Fired on his first day back. Oh, is that illegal? NO ONE CARES. Lawyers aren’t interested because you can only get “Lost Wages” money back, and [World Class State University] has smartly limited all post doc contracts to one year. FMLA cases are small potatoes. The law is justification for companies who are already going to do good, and absolutely has no impact on places that are committed to screwing you.
My daughter is 10 months old now. All of the new parent love and sympathy.
And yet here at [world-class wannabe large state university] we have anguished meeting after anguished meeting about “improving diversity” and “attracting the best of the best.” OBEY THE LAWS AND TRY A LITTLE GOLDEN RULE, SUCKERS! would seem a good means. <sigh>
Not coincidentally, [redacted] also only allows year-long postdoc contracts. Commitment to screwing, indeed.
All that talk by elected officials about “family values” and wanting to do right by families and it is all bullshit. If they gave a single genuine fuck about families in the US, they would give all families REAL paid maternity leave. And six weeks is bullshit. Those first few months can be especially rough as it is without the added stress of trying to get by on a smaller income.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t think I will ever return to the US while I am raising my kids. There just isn’t enough protection for families.
About the only thing that would ever get me to vote for a Republican is a sane U.S. family leave policy.
I think about how breastfeeding rates aren’t terribly high in the US. (especially in places that don’t offer a lot of support to Mothers. i.e. the American South) Then I think, “well there isn’t a lot of time to establish a solid nursing relationship (working out all the things that can crop up as you are learning this new skill and teaching it to your baby.) when you are also rushing back to work just a few weeks after having the baby.” And there isn’t a lot of support to continue that nursing relationship afterwards. I also think about how damn crazy I felt after I had my kids and I had the luxury of being able to stay at home so there was time to properly deal with my crazy without having also worry about the money that wasn’t there, trying to figure out this new person, sort out the childcare, etc… and how there isn’t much thought given to that aspect of the experience. All the while the culture is telling people, “walk it off, you only had a baby.”
Ugh. I love you and I’m sorry. I can’t imagine hearing you had to come back to work early when your baby was barely in double digits. I also can’t imagine HOW they thought physical recovery from birth didn’t count as sick leave! Did you invite the HR person to have a human extraction, then go straight back to work?
I work for the US federal government and just founded a parents network exactly because of shit like this. I was pregnant with my second and STILL did not understand how I could and could not use my own leave. The long term goal is to expand enough that we can try to fix some of this.
I’m actually really surprised that people are surprised by this. As someone with a chronic disability, and who’s husband has a chronic illness that occasionally puts him in the hospital, I’m unfortunately far too familiar with the disaster that is FMLA and all the ways you can get fucked by it.
The only thing FMLA does is guarantee your employer can’t fire you before 12 weeks of UNPAID leave is up. In that 12 weeks is every hour of leave you’ve taken, every doctor’s appointment, whatever. So what do you do? You buy Aflac or other short-term disability coverage, right? HAHAHA, wait you think a for-profit company is going to make it EASY to get paid? Does your doctor LIKE filling out pages and pages of paperwork for you every week? You DID read the fine print, right?
That sounds like a nightmare, and I agree that too much is left up to the policy of the employer. Mine has a very different policy, where all types of paid leave MUST be used before you are allowed to take unpaid. I had been budgeting to take more unpaid during my FMLA protected time so that I could spend time with my family during the holidays after returning mid-November. Instead I had to work through the holidays, and had to go through the approval process for unpaid leave anytime my infant became ill (spoiler alert: 12 week old babies in daycare get sick A LOT)
Not exagerrating to say that I have PTSD from my exact same experience at my university 11.5 years ago. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Was told not only would I not be paid, but my benefits would cease. Not supported by Chair or by people (men and women) in the department who had previously taken a semester’s worth of “sick leave” to pay for FMLA time missed. Kicker? An extension on a tenure clock is only granted when — wait for it! — FMLA is applied for and approved! I was back at work 4 days after I gave birth. Like ladonnapietra, I make sure everyone I know who is expecting/ill/has ill family takes every iota of time/leave they qualify for. I do not read or answer emails after regular work hours, limit my interactions with many colleagues, and focus on the parts of my job that will get me a raise, which aren’t service or teaching, things that previously gave me much pleasure and a large part of my professional identity. There’s a former vice provost who had better look both ways before stepping into the street if I am at the wheel.
Human Resources wouldn't be called that if their goal wasn't to strip mine us.
Ah, but at my work, you can only take short-term disability for 6 weeks if you have a vaginal birth, and only the first two weeks of that are fully paid (2 weeks at 100%; 2 weeks at 80%, and 2 weeks at 60%)
You should pay for a brief consultation with an employment attorney to confirm that your employer's application of the FMLA is actually in compliance with these law. While FMLA is a bare-bones law that only guarantees unpaid leave, the suggestion that it is now "too late" to take sick leave doesn't make sense.
I feel your pain. After trying to negotiate on leave and getting nowhere, I was over 35 when I successfully gave birth, and I quit my job. This was to the consternation of my management, who ignored my requests but tried to tempt me back with money, but nowhere near enough. The women were older, they had kids, they had been in my position, probably, before, but they didn’t bend. I was burned out emotionally and creatively from the hours I was putting in, right up until I couldn’t because I was too pregnant. My partner could absorb the stress of being the sole income provider, and I felt very lucky. I’m hear to say thank you to all of you for voicing your opinions, to the woman who wrote this article, and to The Toast for posting it. I hope more people will vote for progressive causes in the U.S. I wish more people took politics seriously here. It makes me stabby when I think about all the people who don’t know what the issues are, or who their candidates are, or don’t plan to vote at all.
Most people don’t understand that HR’s function is to protect the COMPANY, not you. Most people also don’t understand that just because something is a “policy”, it has any standing whatsoever.
Universities are horrific on this front though, for reasons that elude me. I realize prof time is a sunk cost, but why do they hate their staff?
Me too. Almost exact same story to the point where I am wondering if we worked at the same university. I want to believe we did or it is too depressing to think about how they must train them at conferences to screw women over like this, tell them to save all that time and then tell them that they can’t use it. Oy.
An addendum to the rant: six weeks accrued annual leave is atypical. (Or maybe “atypical outside of academia” is the better way to put it.) My company doesn’t allow accrual of leave year over year–we use our leave or it goes the way of tears in the rain. It *does* have a reasonable policy and culture surrounding maternity leave. But many other companies don’t have this culture but *do* have the restriction on leave accrual.
What’s interesting is that I work for a company headquartered in Israel (which as a country tries to incentivize having kids without sacrificing one’s career) and with offices throughout the world (including the UK and Germany, to pick two examples mentioned in comments here). But the HR policy for the local office is driven by U.S. law. My point is that this can’t be left to corporate policy and assume the good international policy will be inherited by all offices. Even in transnational organizations policies like leave will often fall to the lowest common local denominator.
I can’t even begin to understand the frustration you must have gone through (and still be going through). It’s so wrong that as Americans we aren’t given the same basic rights as citizens of every other country in western civilization. Ugh! I’m sure it’s the same in other professions as well, but I always cringed at the thought of going into academia (which I have now escaped) because of the pressures placed on young people, women particularly I think, in order to obtain tenure/any sort of job security. I always felt like as a young woman I’d have to pretend I wasn’t interested in things like raising a family, otherwise I’d be looked at as a liability. Thanks for sharing your story!
Also the federal government has no maternity leave, so there's that. Great job, America.
I think the saddest thing about this article is that it’s not even about you having to argue your rights to maternity leave (which, coming from Europe, I can’t even believe is something women in any first world country are having to fight for any more), but rather the right to use sick leave and holiday leave to kind of cobble together a makeshift maternity leave. Christ, but that is just archaic.
I think this may be the only answer. I cannot think how you could change the system you have, as there doesn't seem to be any way for The People to effect change. Your entire political process is designed to preserve the status quo, and to disenfranchise the voting public.
This situation sets my teeth on edge. Does anyone have an update on Karen?
This filled me with utter terror, so that I had to go and look up the UK laws. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more relieved to leave here rather than the US:
https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave/leave Statutory Maternity Leave (ie., we won’t fire you) is 52 weeks. A YEAR. And you HAVE to take 2 weeks’ leave after having the baby (4 if you work in a factory) to recover.
https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave/pay Statutory Maternity Pay is 90% of your normal earnings for 6 weeks, then £139.58 per week or 90% of your normal earnings if that’s less. Not great, but that’s for the next 33 weeks.
I’m sure there are annoying loopholes (and you have to start taking it if you’re ill and off work in the last 4 weeks of pregnancy, so that could be irritating) and it’s not as good as just being paid. I am further incredibly lucky in that my employer (University of [Redacted]) would give me 26 weeks at FULL PAY and then 13 weeks at the £139.58 (and then 13 weeks unpaid). I imagine I could use paid leave for the last 13 weeks as well. One nasty snag is that if I decided while spending my days with my baby that I could never leave and go back to work ever, I then might have to GIVE THEM MY PAY BACK (not including the £139.58 a week the govt contributed to that pay). That would be nasty. That’s also true if I stick out my job for less than 3 months. Ick.