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Maternity-Leave Moola

My wife is a clinical social worker and therapist at an integrated health clinic in Massachusetts. This year, like other years, the staff recently received their year-end bonus. This bonus is a relatively paltry $1,000 and is standard across the staff, with no fluctuations based on merit. Everyone gets $1,000 (minus taxes). However, this year my wife took short-term medical leave. Her bonus was prorated to account for the time that she was on leave. Another woman, who was on maternity leave for part of the year, also received a prorated bonus. Is this discriminatory on the part of their employer or just unfair? Both these types of leave are perfectly legal and necessary and, speaking for my wife, enabled her to provide the best care that she could for her patients upon her return. Do these hardworking, dedicated women have any recourse to recoup the rest of their well-deserved bonuses?

— Disgruntled Husband, Massachusetts

It’s unfair, in my opinion, but in this case my opinion carries little weight. This is a legal question, and a very interesting — albeit complicated — one.

I spoke to Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, to get her take. Ms. Chettiar says that if there’s a prorated bonus and it’s clearly based on performance, then what your wife and her colleague experienced was legal.

But what does “performance” mean? Does going on medical or maternity leave mean a person has demonstrated a lesser performance than, say, someone who didn’t? The additional wrinkle here is that you say in general everyone gets the same bonus, so it’s unclear that it is in fact a performance-based bonus.

This is one of those gray-area examples where it comes down to interpretation of the law and the individual circumstance, and whether your wife is being treated the same as other people who took leave. For example, if workers who took leave for something other than disability or medical reasons did NOT have their bonuses prorated, Ms. Chettiar says, that would clearly be discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which make it illegal to retaliate against workers for being pregnant or because of pregnancy-related needs. In this case, however, it seems that your wife is being treated the same as her nonpregnant colleague.

Marylou Fabbo, an employment lawyer in Massachusetts, your home state, said it was important to know that there’s also the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal statute that entitles

employees to take unpaid leave for specific medical or family-related reasons, which include a birth, a relative with health issues that require employee care or, as the website of Department of Labor says, “a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job.” Massachusetts has a fairly new paid-leave law that is similar to that federal law, Ms. Fabbo added.

In this circumstance, she said, while the prorated bonus didn’t sound strictly discriminatory, it didn’t sound particularly fair.

She suggested that it would probably in your wife’s best interest to consult an employment lawyer just to be sure. A statute like the Family and Medical Leave Act would probably require an employer “to pay the full amount, depending on the laws that are applicable to the particular employee,” Ms. Fabbo said.

And if you’re worried that the legal fees would exceed the bonus amount, she pointed out that many employment statutes, including those related to discrimination or failure to pay wages, required the employer to pay the employee’s legal fees if the employee won the case.

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Credit…Photo illustration by Margeaux Walter for The New York Times

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Click the link below for the complete article:

https://www.nytimes.com

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