Nobody should be fired for being pregnant. Claiming that someone you have hired should not be paid because they are pregnant is not only illegal but ridiculous. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens. In one case, the employee who got fired made sure she still got paid every cent she was owed.

One Reddit user shared that she is a campaign manager (CM) for political campaigns, or at least, she was. After her last experience as a campaign manager, she decided she was done with campaigning.

She didn’t know it was going to be her last job as a CM when she took the job. At the time, she was looking for a job that was close to home, and even though this job paid less than she was used to, she still took it since her husband was out of work. She explained that her husband used to made six figures, enough to fully support their family, and her paycheck just went into savings; however, her husband lost his job during Covid and was out of work for 8 months.

Everything was fine at the beginning of her job, but she was overworked and expected to do tasks that were usually done by people in lower positions, such as door knocking. The biggest problem with this was that she was not only pregnant but was also in a car accident (the pregnancy was fine) which left her with back pain. Due to being pregnant, she wasn’t really able to do anything about the back pain. She explained that it was fine; she just had to do most of her job from home. She was still doing her job, but she was unable to do things like door knocking. Unfortunately, the politician didn’t have the funds to pay for more staff to do the lower jobs.

At one point during the campaign the politician’s husband was deployed to “a rather dangerous place.” The politician was worried about her husband and stopped campaigning. She stopped raising money. Eventually, her husband came home, and she was ready to campaign again, but since she has stopped fund raising for awhile, it hurt their budget.

Then, one day the politician called the campaign manager and said, “Since you are pregnant and can no longer door knock you can either work for (state minimum wage) or you can find a new job.”

Fortunately, the CM’s husband had gotten a job offer after 8 months of work, so she didn’t need the job anymore. She wrote, “I stopped her right there and thanked her for the opportunity and told her I would be working my contractually obligated 30 day notice at my current salary and then leaving the campaign. She then began to scream at me about how she wasn’t paying me a dime more and started listing off a list of issues she had with the way I was doing my job. I stopped her. Thanked her once again and told her all of my finishing tasks would be completed when I received payment for the last month I worked (Yes, she was a month behind on paying me) as well as payment for the 30 day notice that she was legally required to pay me whether I continued working or not.”

The politician refused to pay. They both hired lawyers. Even the politician’s lawyer told her to pay the CM. The CM could even see the back and forth emails between her and other staff members because even though she wasn’t working anymore she was still on the emails.

Eventually, the politician calls the former CM around 11pm saying she’ll pay. The CM lets it go to voicemail and decides not to respond until the next day. When she calls back, she explains, “I’ll talk to my lawyer.”

The politician calls the police and tells them the CM was “embezzling campaign funds and stealing her data.” Thankfully, her lawyer explains the situation to the police. 

Then she explained, “The police officer thinks she is nuts at this point… because she is… but then informs her that it considered larceny to withhold my pay and asks me if I would like to press charges. I say ‘If she refused to pay then yes’. Within two days I received a check in the mail with my payment and I turned everything over. The funny thing is that my 30 day notice pay was actually more money than if I had finished out the contract with the reduced pay she wanted to pay me. I got an extra $700 and didn’t have to work for her for the remainder of the time.”

The politician ended up losing the election. In the comments, Reddit users point out that this candidate was never fit to run for office. One comment reads, “If only all politicians could be afforded the opportunity to lose their campaign from their own merit.”

Another Reddit user shared, “My boss fired me to for being pregnant too. I also won the lawsuit.”