You Can Get Fired Due to Pregnancy – True Story

Fire the pregnant- it’s not a myth but reality in India. This is a policy followed by many mid-sized and small firms in India. Something happened that hurts everyday!

During my visit to one of our distributors, I got to know of this incident. A lady in her 30s is employed by this firm as a front desk executive, her role was to take care of office premises and to collect sales enquiries and share them with her manager at the end of the day.

The company policy is to keep employees on probation for 6 months and they will be eligible for many other benefits after the company finds their performance satisfactory. Days were smooth after she joined the firm, she was religiously coming to the office and taking responsibility. After a month of joining, she found out that she was more than a month pregnant and shared the news comfortably with her manager.

The manager supported her for another 5 months of pregnancy in terms of talking nicely and not overburdening her. The lady also took extreme efforts to complete company work by just taking 2 leaves in 6 months and also coming to the office on holidays for work without monetary compensation. She had completed 6 months successfully and she was very happy.

I used to visit their office once or twice a month; she came to me and narrated her happiness. I was happy with the way the company was treating an employee in time of need. During this period I went for an outstation trip and after 10 days when I visited again, it was a different story altogether. She was looking pale and sad; I asked the reason. Worriedly, she murmured that she will talk to me when nobody was in the office.

She came to my desk and explained that MD of the company came a week back and said to her that they are shifting their office to a place far from this and she can’t travel, what can they do? She was numb; she asked him to give her maternity benefits as she had completed her probation. But no response; they told her to leave the office. Even her manager was not happy with this, but he was helpless.

After 3 weeks of all this, the firm asked me to check if I can help them find two people to replace the lady and her boss. Seriously!!

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