“Terrible decision, insensitive, and selfish” aren’t words leaders should ever need to say. But those were the words that Kyte Baby founder Ying Liu used to describe her own behavior after the company terminated an employee named Marissa Hughes.
What happened does seem terrible, insensitive, and selfish, but it was also 100 percent legal. Here’s what happened.
Hughes adopted a baby, Judah, who was hours away from Hughes’ home and workplace. Judah was born early, had medical complications, and was in the NICU. Hughes asked to work remotely, and Kyte Baby offered two weeks of parental leave. However, she had to agree to stay at Kyte Baby for at least six months after the leave to avoid repayment.
Liu denied the request to work from home and terminated Hughes when she didn’t sign or return to work. Here’s why this was legal.
To keep reading, click here: The Kyte Baby CEO’s Actions Were a Disaster — and Perfectly Legal
This may be a very “Capitalist American” way to look at it. Ms. Hughes probably didn’t plan for any of this. Adoptions can be very unscheduled and have a lot of unknowns. It was unfortunate that she didn’t qualify for FMLA. She almost certainly did not think “I’m going to go ahead and adopt a baby before I meet the FMLA threshold and expect my workplace to make an exception for me”. It was not her employer’s responsibility to make sure that she had all of the accommodations that she needed to take care of events in her personal life. Could / Would / Should the company have done more for Ms. Hughes? Maybe. BUT would that have possibly opened a can of worms? What if another employee gave birth 7 months after her hire date and was not granted any leave above what she was entitled to receive? A man who just started with the company has a parent that suffered a stroke and now should he also get FMLA? This is a slippery slope. Employers should do what they can to accommodate their employees when they can do so fairly. Otherwise, they could find themselves in legal trouble that leaves them bankrupt, and then nobody has a job.