Human Resource Blog

Maternity Leave in New Hampshire

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

Depending on the circumstances, it may or may not be illegal to lay off or fire a worker who is on maternity leave.

If an employer is undergoing a general layoff and a fair number of people are involved, then employees on maternity leave or pregnant workers need not be exempt from those layoffs.

The two laws providing the guidelines here are the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA).

The FMLA guarantees workers as many as 12 weeks of unpaid, job protected leave yearly. The leave may be used for several different reasons. One allowable reason is to care for and bond with a newly adopted child, a newborn, or a newly placed foster child.

Workers are entitled under the FMLA to return to their old jobs. If that is not possible, they must be returned to a job with the same pay, working conditions, and benefits as the job they left.

The PDA makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against a woman simply because of a pregnancy.

However, assume, for example, that an employee “Mary,” an administrative assistant, takes maternity leave. While she is absent, the firm she works for finds it must downsize. It will lay off 50% of the labor force. Among those layoffs will be the positions of 10 administrative assistants. The company is basing the layoffs on seniority. Under these guidelines, she falls into the layoff group. This would be entirely legal.

The PDA allows for general layoffs that include pregnant women.

If Mary’s supervisor were to lay her off because he likes the work of “Jill,” the temporary replacement, better, and there is no comparable job for Mary to return to, John’s decision would not be legal under the FMLA.

Eleven states have passed their own, differing family leave laws. They are Wisconsin, Washington, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Jersey, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, Hawaii, Connecticut, and California. The answer to the question posed will differ from state to state. JH