Pregnancy Discrimination and Harassment is against the law. Discrimination and harassment is prohibited in all employment practices, including: 1) advertisements, 2) applications, screening, interviews, 3) hiring, transferring, promoting, terminating, or separating employees, 4) working conditions and 5) participation in a training or apprenticeship program, employee organization or union.
Employees can recover damages including reinstatement, lost wages, lost benefits, promotion, compensatory damages, emotional distress damages, attorney's fees and even punitive damages.
In addition, the California Pregnancy Disability Leave Law ("PDLL") requires California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for employees actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions. This leave can be taken all at once or intermittently. It is important to note that California's PDLL requires California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for employees actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions even if the employer's policies do not grant employees suffering from other short-term disabilities a similar amount of leave. In other words, California's PDLL requires that California employers give pregnant workers special, rather than simply equal treatment.
In California, once the employee has given birth she may be entitled to an additional 12-weeks of leave "for the reason of the birth of a child" under the California Family Rights Act ("CFRA"). Entitlement to CFRA leave for the birth of a child depends on 1) whether the employer employs more than 50 employees within a seventy five mile radius; and 2) whether the employee worked more than 1,250 hours in the 12 months preceding the first day of the requested CFRA leave or any pregnancy disability leave and 3) whether the employee has more than one year of service with the employer. An employee must meet all of these requirements in order to be a qualified employee under the CFRA.
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