Current Events > Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity leave for laid-off employees

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/17/google-nixes-paying-out-rest-of-medical-leave-for-laid-off-employees.html

Google is indicating to ex-staffers, who got laid off while on maternity and medical leave, that they wont get paid for all of their remaining time off, according to former employees and written correspondence shared with CNBC. More than 100 former workers have organized a group they call Laid off on Leave. Theyre asking executives to pay them for the weeks and months they were approved to take off before the job cuts were announced in January. Those who spoke with CNBC said theyve been told theyll only receive pay through their designated end date, along with standard severance. The group of former employees sent a letter to executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai and Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi, on three separate occasions, most recently on March 9, without receiving a response. The group includes people who were approved for or are currently on maternity leave, baby bonding leave, caregivers leave, medical leave and personal leave. Early last year, Google announced it would be increasing parental leave for full-time employees to 18 weeks for all parents and 24 weeks for birth parents. Cicconi said at the time that the company wanted to offer extraordinary benefits so employees could spend more time with their new baby, look after a sick loved one or take care of their own wellbeing. But Google parent Alphabet has since entered its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades on the public market. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following an extended period of expansion in the tech sector. Pichai said U.S.-based employees would receive 16 weeks of severance pay plus two weeks for each additional year they worked at Google. The company also said it would include paid time off in the severance.

One woman said she was laid off a week after her maternity leave was approved. Another said she received notice while on maternity leave, a week before she was due to give birth. Some discussed the matter publicly. Exactly a week after receiving the text and sharing the exciting news that my maternity leave was approved, I got the already widely talked-about email letting me know that I was among the 12k terminated, a Google program manager wrote on LinkedIn. Easy target? Maybe. Another longtime employee, Kate Howells, posted that she gave birth just before receiving notice. On 1/20/23 at 7:05 am while in the hospital bed holding my hours-old newborn I learned that I was part of the #thegolden12K of Googlers who had been laid off, Howells wrote. I was a Googler for 9.5 years.

"Sorry, but we need that money to go into the pockets of our shareholders. Please understand."

Use this as a lesson, your employer doesn't give a shit about you. Stop giving a shit about your employer.

In the past, I probably applied to work for Google about 10 times. I'm glad I never actually went down the road of actually working there at this point.

Remember when Google said dont be evil? lol

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Of course it is. If they are actually eliminating the position anyways you don't have to keep someone hired there who might be out on FMLA or maternity.

Even the "nice" employers with good benefits are only nice so long as they think it's advantageous to them. The only ways workers can even approach being guaranteed anything is through well enforced laws, collective bargaining agreements enforced by militant unions, or owning the workplace directly.

tbh this is why I believe in stronger labor unions. Employers always fuck over their employees when it benefits them.