Dive Brief:
- A jury should hear a former HR business partner’s pregnancy discrimination claim against finance company Santander Consumer USA, a federal district court in Texas held Feb. 4 (Mathew v. Santander Consumer USA, Inc.). The worker produced evidence that the company engaged in a “sudden and unprecedented campaign to document [her] deficiencies” after she learned she was pregnant, a judge said.
- Shortly after the HR business partner informed a new supervisor she was pregnant, the director of HR suggested she be terminated, according to court documents. Santander placed her on a 30-day performance improvement plan and terminated her following a 90-day extension, citing work habits and time management issues.
- The HR business partner sued Santander for alleged pregnancy discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court granted summary judgment to Santander on the retaliation claim but held that a jury must decide the discrimination claim. Santander’s “lack of contemporaneously-created documentation” of the alleged performance issues raised a trial question over the true reason she was fired, the court said.
Dive Insight:
While recent focus has been on accommodating pregnant employees under the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act, allegations of pregnancy-related discharge consistently stand out among charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an EEOC guidance notes.
Separate from the PWFA, Title VII, as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, prohibits employers from firing, refusing to hire or taking “any other adverse action against a woman because she is pregnant, without regard to her ability to perform the duties of the job,” the guidance states.
However, Title VII and PWFA claims often overlap, as they sometimes do with claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
For example, in January, a former Publix employee sued the supermarket chain for violating the PWFA, Title VII, the ADA, the FMLA and the Florida Civil Rights Act.
According to the complaint, the employee experienced severe morning sickness, pregnancy-related hypertension and other pregnancy-related medical conditions. She alleged that Publix fired her because she requested and used a reasonable accommodation for these limitations and conditions and because she planned to take FMLA leave for the baby’s birth and care.
The Santander case gets back to basic issues commonly raised in employment cases — namely, timing and documentation.
As for the timing issue, the HR business partner’s performance review for the year before she disclosed her pregnancy noted that she consistently met expectations and praised her mentoring skills and for being supportive to her business partners’ needs, court records showed.
Yet, less than a month after she told her new supervisor she was pregnant, the HR director suggested terminating her, according to the record. Her new supervisor then emailed her former supervisor soliciting documentation, court records said.
Notably, there was no documentation that the HR business partner was ever disciplined prior to this point or even before she was put on the PIP, the court pointed out.
The court said this was important because employees stated that Santander always documented when it took disciplinary action and PIPs were never worked on without the proper documentation.
“Santander’s reliance on a retrospective list of performance issues combined with a lack of contemporaneous documentation” raised a trial question over whether it “acted to create an exculpatory paper trail” as a pretext for firing the HR business partner because she was pregnant, the court held.
