Cat Fan was in bed last November, recovering from major abdominal surgery, when her phone started blowing up.
Facebook's parent company, Meta, had just announced a first round of layoffs: 11,000 employees, about 13% of the company, would lose their jobs.
Fan, a mother of three, had been a recruiting manager for Meta for almost five years.
But in the midst of a medical leave, she suddenly found herself without a job. Her layoff notification came while she was still on pain medications, in and out of sleep.
"By the time I woke up and checked my laptop, [I] was already fully locked out," she says.
With the recent wave of layoffs in tech, media and elsewhere, stories of people laid off while on medical or parental leave are proliferating.
"I was washing baby bottles while humming a damn Wiggles song stuck in my head ... when I got the news," one laid-off tech worker recently posted on LinkedIn. "I thought I was protected being on maternity leave ... and obviously I was wrong."
Indeed, there is nothing illegal about laying off an employee in the middle of a leave "provided there's sufficient documentation that there's a legitimate, non-retaliatory reason that's based on the business," says Arianna Mouré, a labor and employment attorney with Scarinci Hollenbeck.
In other words, companies cannot use an employee's medical or parental leave as the reason to lay that person off.
"They have to be treated just the same, as if they...
Did you know that Caitlin Clark is an "avatar for people who want to spread hate"? Because Cari Champion does. Did you know that the fans who latched onto her are just middle Americans "who want t...