In mid-May, Cierra McClain, a server at First Watch, learned that she was six weeks pregnant. She immediately passed the news along to her manager.
McClain was working at a Durham location of the national breakfast restaurant chain, near Southpoint Mall. Her decision to divulge the pregnancy was driven by a misconception about North Carolina law: she thought that workers were legally obligated to disclose pregnancies to their employers.
A less optimistic person might have based that assumption on our legislature’s affinity for policing the bodies of its constituents, but McClain, a bubbly Georgia native who tries to see the best in people, envisioned the requirement—which, to be clear, does not exist on state nor federal levels—as a common sense safety precaution. In case of emergency, she figured, it was imperative that a supervisor be made aware of a worker’s pregnancy at the earliest possible date.
Indeed, the next month, McClain did find herself in an emergency situation at First Watch: she slipped on a pool of water that had accumulated under a ceiling leak and fell hard on her left side, bruising her hip and knee. When she was seen by a doctor that night, she learned that a blood clot had formed around her placenta.
McClain is okay now, and her unborn child isn’t in danger. But her transparency with First Watch—transparency that she’d imagined would help in a situation like slipping on a wet spot—played no role in her recovery, she says. In fact, it ended up making...
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