Photo: TikTok
She needs to fight this.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Apr 14, 2022
A pregnant woman by the name of Skye posted on TikTok to tell her story about how her job was not providing her with the right accommodations required for her “high-risk pregnancy.”
Even after a doctor’s note, her job would not let her sit down and required that she stand for nine hours every day.
Skye’s pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage and she blames her job for failing to offer accommodations.
Her TikTok has received nearly 300,000 views and was titled with a simple frowny face as she hides from her supervisors so she can get a moment of rest.
“At my job I stand and walk 9 hours a day. My gyno wrote my job a note saying I needed a stool cuz I’m a high-risk pregnancy,” read her caption. “They said no so I hide in the stock room when they don’t know. I’m in so much pain from not getting accommodations cuz ‘then everyone will want to sit.’”
Instantly, everyone in the comments becomes a legal consultant — but in this case, they’re right.
Women and those who can get pregnant shared their own personal experiences where they’ve had to sue their job for not providing the right accommodations — it’s against the law.
In another TikTok she posted to her account, she mentions how there is another woman whose due date is three days apart from hers, but they’ve given her a stool and are even transferring her to work at a desk.
“New job time,” rings the sentiment of many people, alongside comments telling her to sue her workplace and hire a lawyer to do it, but it’s not quite as simple as people would like it to be.
She got the job originally to save money for the baby’s birth, so she doesn’t have the funds to hire a lawyer and sue.
Calls for “pro-bono” lawyers don’t work in her situation because she and her husband collectively make a lot more money than would qualify them for that, it’s just that they live in a very expensive area.
When she snuck a stool behind the register, they threatened to fire her on the spot.
When she asked to speak to HR, they told her that they didn’t have an HR because they quit, so she filed something through corporate.
When she went for an ultrasound, she learned she had lost the baby.
“We went to our ultrasound this morning and the baby hasn’t grown,” she wrote in another TikTok. “The heart stopped beating. The baby is still in there and I might need surgery.”
A miscarriage is something that no woman should ever have to go through. Sometimes things happen, but this was one situation that could have been entirely prevented, according to Skye.
“I blame my job. I blame the lack of accommodations. I blame the stress and the physical labor,” she wrote.
She was a high-risk pregnancy, to begin with, but the baby could have survived had the right accommodations been given to her to prevent any more complications.
Now, she’s selling all of the baby stuff she had bought prematurely for her child and is researching lawyers to try and fight her workplace.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.