Woman fired, denied severance pay for being pregnant, teaches boss that truth always wins

Editor's note: This article was originally published on January 4, 2022. It has since been updated.

A local politician tried to shortchange her campaign manager, but her plan backfired spectacularly. The campaign manager, who was pregnant, was working diligently to get the candidate elected. Upon discovering her pregnancy, her boss refused to pay her, stating, “Since you are pregnant and can no longer door knock, you can either work for the state minimum wage or you can find a new job.” Taking her boss's words to heart, she chose to maliciously comply by doing only what was required of her. Previously, she had been handling extra duties, but she decided to stick strictly to her assigned tasks. Her sweet revenge for the unfair treatment was shared on Reddit by the campaign manager (joke_on_you9719) in a post titled: "Boss fired me for being pregnant, I’m the one who gets paid in the end."

The campaign manager, a 24-year-old rising star in local politics, was highly sought after. "I am the youngest campaign manager to run a statewide race in about the last 20 years," she noted in her post. When she joined the local campaign to stay close to home, there was no existing framework, so she had to build it from scratch. "There was no one other than the candidate. I ended up building out our entire team, consultant, fundraiser, staff, etc.," she explained.

The 24-year-old had found out she was pregnant and a week after joining the campaign, she also had an accident that resulted in a herniated disc. She could still run things as agreed upon since they could all be handled from home and staff could do the rest. She started work and everything was going on as planned. "We had a team meeting with the entire team and I started pressuring the candidate about all the things she wasn’t doing and there was a legitimate meltdown. She started yelling at me about how I wasn’t doing my job and my pregnancy wasn’t her problem, and how I was the reason everything was falling apart and then hung up on the entire team," she wrote.

The campaign manager had earlier been taking on the work of other departments as well but decided to maliciously comply by doing just her role. "I decided to take a step back from doing all the duties that are typically handled by lower-level staff and just focused on doing my job duties which weren’t being appreciated." Her boss responded by threatening to cut her salary. “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,” the campaign manager was told.

She decided enough was enough. "So 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," she wrote, adding that a month's salary was also pending. "She sent me a nasty email again reiterating that I wouldn’t be paid and listed about 10 things that I had done to be terminated, including that I didn’t wear make-up to work every day," she wrote.

She shared the email with the team, and everyone except her consultant quit. "In 5 minutes, she lost everyone she had." The boss then began bad-mouthing her in the campaign email, to which she was still subscribed. The boss admitted that the campaign manager was doing her job but accused her of being "dishonest" about her pregnancy, simply wanting to pay her less. Unwittingly, the boss also sent a signed copy of her contract, detailing the severance she was entitled to. "She has given me every piece of ammunition I need to get paid at this point as well as wage a discrimination suit for referencing my pregnancy as a reason for termination," she wrote and told her boss that she could talk to her lawyer for any further clarifications.

"She has the consultant call me begging me to turn over the stuff. In a matter of two weeks, she is out of money and struggling. She finally emails me at 11 pm that she is willing to pay me," reads the Reddit post. Matters escalate, and her boss tells the police she has been embezzling money. "The police officer thinks she is nuts at this point… because she is… but then informs her that it is 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. I got an extra $700 and didn’t have to work for her for the remainder of the time. She ended up losing her election in a swing district by 15 points."