"My maternity leave was supposed to start next Monday and I got laid off today," former Bungie employee says

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Gaming@beehaw.org – 157 points –
"My maternity leave was supposed to start next Monday and I got laid off today," former Bungie employee says
videogamer.com
16

pretty sure that’s illegal and they can sue for the maternity leave pay as well as discrimination….
lots of corps(e) don’t want to employ mothers of young children, as there’s lots of legally excused absences and they can’t press them for as much overtime….

Only illegal if the maternity leave was the reason, and it can be shown to be the reason. Over 200 people were also laid off at the same time. I have no doubt bungie added them because of the maternity leave, but it's gonna be really hard to show in a court of law.

“Not a team player” “Culture mismatch”

Not even, it's just a case of "this role was one of many eliminated as part of a larger cost-cutting measure affecting 200 employees."

Bungie’s layoffs have been devastating. 220 jobs were eliminated yesterday, while other jobs had been shifted over to PlayStation Studios.

Sadly it's all but impossible to show their layoff was because of maternity leave and not just because they were 'part of the layoff'...

Hope there's a paper trail adding them to the list of layoffs because of the maternity leave, but I doubt they'd be stupid enough to put it down on paper.

Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.

My work is in the process of hiring someone to replace me since I'm headed to a new job. After a recent interview, a co-worker on the hiring committee made a comment on Teams, "His age seems OK."

Uhhh, maybe we shouldn't be talking about age in hiring decisions. Especially on a written medium. Pretty sure that in the US, age discrimination laws starts at like 40yo, including hiring and firing. That interviewee seemed to be over 40yo, which is probably what prompted that comment.

Not that I think the candidate will sue us if we don't hire him, but it's just unnecessary risk. And I don't even work in HR or legal; rather I'm in IT. Surprised HR didn't say anything about that comment.

That whole mindset is weird to me. I’m in my mid 40s and just got hired on as a team lead for a bunch of kids who are fresh out of college. They’re exactly where I am when I started and I’m excited to share my 20 years of experience and mentor them.

They wanted to hire me on as their supervisor but I made it clear that the extra couple grand a year for that headache didn’t interest me.

It is. Additionally, my co-worker who made the comment is like 33-34. I'm 37. Another person on the committee is 40. HR is like 64. So it's not like we're a bunch of young guns ourselves lol. We should want experience, and with experience tends to come age.

But yeah, I getcha on the management thing. I'm technically a manager, but I don't have any subordinates. Because I told them, they're going to have pay me way more to become an actual manager with direct reports, especially since I'd lose my non-exempt status. To make me exempt, they'd need to make it worth my while. We're a non-profit, so we already get paid crap (though benefits are excellent).

The head of bungie spent a shit ton on classic cars, but they're laying people off... I really want to see wtf happened to bungie internally. It went to shit the past decade.