Location: Minnesota
My wife works in HR/Recruiting for a medium sized manufacturing company where she’s been for a little bit over 2 years. She is 6 months pregnant with our first child and she disclosed this to her manager, team, and various co-workers in late October-early November. She hasn’t formally applied for any sort of maternity leave or PFMLA and hasn’t talked with her manager much on the pregnancy subject besides about upcoming appointments, etc. For doctor’s appointments, her manager has allowed her to work late throughout the week to make up time instead of taking PTO which we thought was nice so she could save more PTO for leave.
The company doesn’t have any formal parental leave policy for office employees. They’re a union shop and have a robust parental leave policy for production employees but the same isn’t offered to non-union employees.
Today in her one on one with her manager her manager gave her a 6 page document with 21 bullet points on it of various mistakes she’s made at work dating back to late 2024. Some of the mistakes are from a lack of organization and my wife admits she could’ve done better, but many of them are quite a stretch and at most mildly impact the day to day of her department. After the conversation, she was told she’s being put on a paid leave for an undetermined amount of time and was told she would be called tomorrow. My wife asked if she had any choice in the matter as she would like to continue working and was told no. Her manager took her work phone and laptop with the reason of, “she didn’t want their conversation today to impact her work.” So she doesn’t have any ability to look back at emails/conversations to try and provide counterpoints or context to the “mistakes” she was confronted about today.
My question is, do we have any recourse to the situation? It feels like the timing with my wife’s pregnancy is playing into this decision as she hasn’t been confronted about these mistakes much prior to today.
We appreciate any help or advice we can get. We understand we don’t have anything to say she’s being disciplined and potentially fired because she’s pregnant, just want to understand what we can do to protect ourselves in this situation.
Thanks.