Thursday, Jul 24, 2014 02:30 PM +0200
“I was illegally terminated”: A working mom’s Wal-Mart nightmare
An absurd policy allowed the mega-retailer to run roughshod over Tiffany Beroid. Here’s how bad it really got
Politicians love to talk about working moms managing their busy lives, particularly when those working moms managing their busy lives decide to go back to school. Add in a pregnancy, and you basically have the ideal hypothetical woman, tailor made to be praised and lionized during some campaign speech from some candidate explaining just how focused they are on the needs of women.
But Tiffany Beroid isn’t a political abstraction, she’s a real person who wanted to finish her degree while managing the demands of work, family and a high-risk pregnancy. And despite a lot of lip service from lawmakers, policies that support working mothers are few and far between. Beroid was employed at a Wal-Mart in Laurel, Maryland for about three years when she decided to go back to school part-time. She said she tried to work out a schedule that could accommodate the demands of work, family and school, but the company responded by cutting her hours. In fact, her hours — and income — were cut so drastically that Beroid eventually had to drop out of school. When her high-risk pregnancy meant that she needed to be put on lighter work, she was placed on unpaid leave. When she raised these problems to Wal-Mart, she was fired.
“Wal-Mart fired me for speaking out,” Beroid said of the ordeal….
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/24/i_was_illegally_terminated_a_working_moms_wal_mart_nightmare/#
