When Carla, a 36-year-old Brooklynite, was eight months into her pregnancy, she started to feel a bit crowded — and it wasn’t because of her swelling stomach.
Rather, she thought her employer — an independent publisher where she worked as a marketer — was rapidly squeezing her out to make room for her replacement after she gave birth.
“They were redoing the office and weren’t making a space for me [for when I came back],” says Carla, who declined to use her real name out of fear of career repercussions. “I asked where I was going to sit, and they were like, ‘We’ll figure that out.’ ”
Carla’s plight — and that of other new metro-area moms — stands in stark contrast to the notion that working mothers can have it all.
In July, Marissa Mayer became a new poster child for such progress when Yahoo! named the pregnant 37-year-old— a veritable zygote by executive standards — the company’s new CEO. As her own boss, she’ll have the chance to challenge traditional conventions of maternity leave, if she desires. But for many corporate civilians, hammering out family leave can become a tedious negotiation, often rooted in one key bargaining point: The companies think they’re doing you a favor.
If you’re pregnant and have worked at one place for at least 12 months (and for at least 1,250 hours during that year), your employer is required to guarantee your job for at least 12 weeks from the time you give birth, thanks to a national law called the Family Medical Leave Act.
“Don’t confuse the two things,” cautions Dwight Tierney, an HR executive. “You get maternity leave. Paid maternity leave is not mandatory.”
More progressive states also tack legislation on top of the FMLA: California and New Jersey, for example, have added paid family leave programs to supplement the FMLA. There’s currently a growing movement in New York for more protection, too.
Last year, state Sen. Liz Krueger sponsored a bill that would require employers to better accommodate pregnant women, preventing them from getting pushed out of their jobs. Another bill, the Family Leave Insurance Act, asks for 12 weeks of paid leave.An earlier version of that bill almost passed the New York Assembly in 2005 and 2007, and it will be reintroduced in January,with the goal of passing in June.
“We frequently hear from women who are shocked they have no right to paid maternity leave,” says Dina Bakst, co-founder and president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit advocacy group for working families which, in June, met with legislators about relaunching a family leave insurance campaign in New York. “When we compare where New York stands with the rest of the world, we still have a long way to go.”
According to NationMaster.com, our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, offer 50 weeks and 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, respectively. Across the pond in England, working moms receive 20 weeks’ paid leave.
And Tierney suspects during the recession, this disparity has gotten worse. “More and more companies are redesigning benefits programs to manage costs,” hesays. “To keep somebody on pay roll . . . becomes very expensive for companies.”
Too often, change unfolds in baby steps. For now, most women who don’t get paid while on maternity leave can file for six to eight weeks of state-sanctioned disability pay, which typically offers only $200 or less a week.
For Carla, the marketer for the independent publisher, the rigors of navigating her maternity leave effectively ended her career. She first suspected her transition from marketer to mom wasn’t going to be easy when she found out the company didn’t have at least 50 employees. This exempted the company from the FMLA,which would have bound the publisher to hold her job.
Regardless, they verbally assured her she’d be welcome back — but after having her baby, Carla called and emailed her boss repeatedly, without a reply. She finally swung by the office, and her boss said, “ ‘We don’t want you to feel like you have to rush back.’ ”
The two verbally agreed to a start date.
As the day approached, Carla emailed and called, to no avail. “There was something wrong at this point,” she says. “Friends [at the job] were like, ‘I don’t think you have a job.’ ”
Frustrated, Carla finally filed for unemployment — only to be denied those benefits because her company claimed she quit.
“Unemployment was an afterthought when I realized I had been pushed out in a really odd way,” she explains. She appealed and won compensation for just a couple of months.
For other women, circumstances can be saddled by written-in-stone policies.
Natalie, an otherwise cheerful Manhattan public school teacher, says her maternity leave experience left her cash-strapped and confused.
“Don’t trust the answers you’re given — you have to find them out yourself,” says the Brooklyn resident, 36, who also asked The Post not to use her real name. “The payroll secretary wasn’t even familiar with FMLA. . . I had to do a lot of research about my options.”
According to NYC Department of Education spokeswoman Connie Pankratz, employees are entitled to six weeks of unpaid maternity leave, which runs concurrently with the 12 weeks they’re entitled to under the FMLA.
“Depending on individual circumstances, additional leave may also be allowed,” Pankratz adds in an email.
Natalie was due in August — when junior high was out of session — so she figured her leave would begin when school started again. But according to the DOE, the six weeks of DOE-sanctioned leave begins as soon as your baby is born — so she ended up being on summer vacation and maternity leave at the same time.
“I’m so thankful I’m not a single mother,” she says. “It’s hard enough for two people.”
Mallory, now 35, was just two months into her Web-based job at a mid-sized media company in Manhattan, so she didn’t qualify for protection under the FMLA. Still, her boss agreed to give her six weeks of unpaid leave after she gave birth, followed by two weeks working from her New Jersey home. She and her husband saved up, and she also applied for disability.
As her belly grew, she continued to log 11-to-12 hour workdays to avoid ruffling feathers.
“I was completely prepared to go into labor at my desk,” says Mallory, who asked The Post not to use her real name. But her plans were derailed when she unexpectedly went into labor eight weeks early. Mallory’s doctors stopped the premature birth but placed her on bed rest.
When she asked to work from home, the company told her it had no work-at-home policy — despite having granted it to another employee who fell ill.
“I was totally shocked,” Mallory says of her employer’s sudden cold shoulder.
She finally entreated her boss and HR to let her work from home, but it came with one caveat: She could no longer work at home for the two weeks after the baby was born.
She ended up taking eight weeks of unpaid leave, modestly supplemented by disability.
In situations like these, Bakst recommends doing your research.
“See if you can find industry-specific examples and make a case,” she says. “If there are no policies on the books, you may be blazing a trail.”
Carla, now a mother of two, hasn’t worked since her jarring experience more than two years ago. Since her husband made adecent income, she decided to stay at home— a luxury low income moms don’t have. She’s tried to make peace with her plight, but it’s hard.
“I’ve been home for so long,” she says, “it really felt like career suicide.”