Anticipating attendance issues, company preemptively fires pregnant employee

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) forbids pregnancy bias in any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, or any other term or condition. Although the Act was signed into law more than 40 years ago and great strides have been made to allow women to work while pregnant, pregnancy discrimination remains a widespread problem. Just ask the server who was fired from an Arizona eatery because the owner couldn’t “have a big fat pregnant woman working in my restaurant” (for more details, see my November 2017 article in the Arizona Employment Law Letter). Sadly, pregnancy bias still presents itself in other blatant forms. How so, you ask? Read on.

Facts as alleged by the EEOC

Tiffany Lewis was visibly pregnant when a staffing agency hired and placed her in a customer service representative (CSR) position with a 24-hour call center. The job required her to complete a two-week training session. Approximately a week into the class, she was released from the CSR assignment.

Afterward, Lewis asked the staffing agency why her assignment had ended. She was told it was cut short because of low call volume. She responded she didn’t understand how the reason could be low call volume since another training class was scheduled to start in a couple of weeks. She received no further clarification.

Later, another CSR told Lewis she heard Lewis and another CSR named “Peralta” had been terminated because of their pregnancies based on management’s belief they would be unable to comply with the company’s attendance policy.