Human Resource Blog

Maternity Leave in Georgia

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Can a Georgia employee on maternity leave be laid off or fired?

There are conditions under which it is entirely legal to lay off an employee who is on maternity leave. There are many conditions under which it is not legal.

If an employer is going through a general layoff, for example, pregnant workers or workers on maternity leave are not necessarily exempt from the overall layoff. As an example, administrative assistant “Mary” is on maternity leave. She is employed by a company that, in her absence, must downsize. The employer has determined that 50% of the labor force must be laid off. Layoffs are decided on the basis of seniority, and include administrative assistants. Mary is part of that group. The company may lay her off even though she is currently on maternity leave.

However, there are conditions under which it would probably not be legal to lay off Mary. Under another scenario, her supervisor, John, assigned her duties to a new administrative assistant, “Jill,” during her absence. John prefers the new person’s work better than Mary’s. Because there is no comparable job with the same working conditions and benefits for Mary when she returns, he decides to lay off Mary and put Jill in her place. That would be illegal.

The operative law is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), which entitles workers to as much as 12 weeks of unpaid, job protected leave annually. There are many purposes for the law. One is to allow workers to take time to raise a newborn child or a newly adopted child, or to care for a recently placed foster child.

“Job protected” means workers are entitled to return to their former jobs or to a comparable one with the same kinds of pay, working conditions, and benefits.

The federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against a woman because she is pregnant. The PDA, however, does not forbid employers from laying her off as part of a larger layoff.

Eleven states have their own family leave laws. They are Wisconsin, Washington, Vermont, Rhode Island, Oregon, New Jersey, Minnesota, Maine, Hawaii, Connecticut, and California. JH