A former manager of the swanky Standard Hotel says she was booted from her job after giving birth to a baby in one of the hotel rooms.
Tara Tan often worked 100 hours a week in the hotel, and was one of the people who helped to get it up and running – only to be given the boot when a superior declared that she didn’t fit into the “culture of the hotel.”
The $10 million dsicrimination suit says that meant “that she did not possess the physical attributes to work at the hotel because at over 40 years of age and having recently given birth to two children she was, so far as defendants were concenrrned, not young, thin of model-like proportions, or one of ‘the beautiful people’ desired at the hotel.”
Tan’s problems began after she gave birth to her second child inside a room there last March, the suit says.
Tan, who’d continued working late into her pregnancy despite her doctor’s orders to take it easy, had suddenly gone into labor, and by the time her husband arrived from their New Jersey home, she was in excruciating pain in a room on the 15th floor.
“I said, ‘Lay me down. She’s coming,'” Tan recalled. Hubby Sean Kehoe was on the phone with her doctor, and delivered the baby himself. They called an ambulance – and the hotel had them taken out a side door so they wouldn’t disturb the Friday night party crowd, the suit says.
Tan was back working remotely three days later – and was docked time for the hours she’d missed, the suit says. She soon found her duties being stripped away from her – and was canned earlier this year after she was falsely accused of stealing boxes from her office, the suit says.
“She’s a good soul and a hard worker, and deserved better,” said her lawyer, Keith Watanabe.
A rep for the hotel did not respond to requests for comment.