Woman fired for being pregnant and denied severance pay, teaches boss that the 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 pull a fast one on her campaign manager and refused to pay her salary but ended up paying way more. The campaign manager was a mom-to-be and working to get her candidate elected. After learning she was pregnant, her boss refused to pay her salary. “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,” she was told. When her boss questioned her work, she decided to maliciously comply with her boss' request to do her work. Earlier, she had been picking up extra work from other departments as well, but she decided to stick to what her boss told her and it was sweet revenge for the treatment meted out to her. The story was shared by the campaign manager (joke_on_you9719) on Reddit. The post was titled: "Boss fired me for being pregnant, I’m the one who gets paid in the end."

The campaign manager has made quite a name for herself in local circles and the 24-year-old was in demand. "I am the youngest campaign manager to run a statewide race in about the last 20 years," she mentioned in the post. When she signed up for a local campaign in a bid to stay close to home, there was no framework in place for the campaign and she had to build one from scratch. "There was no one other than the candidate. I ended up building out our entire team, consultant, fundraiser, staff, etc," she said.

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, but her consultant quit: "In 5 minutes, she lost everyone she had." The boss started bad-mouthing her in the campaign email to which she was still subscribed. The boss admitted in the email that the campaign manager was doing her job but had been "dishonest" about her pregnancy. She just wanted to pay a pregnant woman less. Her boss also unwittingly sent a signed copy of her contract, mentioning 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."