Former T-Mobile Employee Says That They Actually Made Her Use Vacation Time To Pee While Pregnant

Oh the injustices that pregnant women can endure on the job — and by “women” I specifically don’t mean the Lean In crowd. Rich women of privilege may need to band together for the “having it all” parade, but some pregnant women can’t even use the bathroom on the job without employer scrutiny, such as Kristi Rifkin.

The mother reportedly became pregnant with her third child when she was working at Nashville T-Mobile Call Center — a job that she had held for four years and loved. According to ABC News, she left another company primarily because T-Mobile had such “great benefits.” All was sunshine and rainbows as she got schedules she needed without problem.

But once she got knocked up, she says that T-Mobile’s attitude towards her changed.

Her pregnancy was reportedly “difficult,” with bi-weekly doctor’s visits to your standard OBGYN and a high-risk OBGYN. Per doctor’s orders, 40-year-old Kristi was instructed to drink a lot of water. Consequently, this meant plenty of trips to pee (as is pretty standard with most pregnancies).

Although T-Mobile didn’t fire Kristi straight away — or bar her from going to the bathroom — they did put her in a lousy situation. She writes on MomsRising.org that the following ensued:

But my company warned me getting up to use the toilet would cut into what people in the call center industry call ”adherence” a metric that measures the degree to which employees stick to their schedules. Being on the phone was my job, so if I wasn’t, I risked being written up and possibly fired. Essentially the message was, ”You can go, but understand that if you don’t meet that metric at the end of the day, week and month, we have the opportunity to fill your seat.” They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use the toilet. But the reality was that this is a metric on how your job is measured and if you don’t meet it, then you do not have your job.

According to Kristi, she was allotted two 15 minutes breaks and a half hour lunch. She describes the general vibe around the office as, ”If you can’t take care of your biological needs in that time period,  you don’t go.” Even if you’re caring a human, it seems.

That’s when Kristi started to disobey her doctor’s orders for the sake of keeping her job that she sorely needed to support her family:

So I held off eating and drinking. I just couldn’t afford to lose my job or my health insurance during such a high-risk pregnancy.

It was insane.

Her doctor started to rightly express concern and so Kristi claims to have had “a long consultation with H.R.” T-Mobile asked for a doctor’s note for all these potty breaks, which Kristi provided. But the company still “was absolutely not going to pay me for going to the toilet.” T-Mobile told her that she could use the bathroom whenever she needed . However, she would have to clock out every time she did, consequently using vacation time and Family and Medical Leave Act (unpaid time off, just so we’re clear) to adequately care for her unborn child — per doctor’s orders. But even that profound injustice didn’t bode well for Kristi’s pregnancy:

It was all too much. I still wasn’t eating, drinking and using the toilet like I was supposed it. I was getting sick. My blood pressure was sky high. I was stressed about the possibility of losing my job and my health insurance. I was stressed about not being able to take care of myself and my baby. And being stressed out was only going to make my pregnancy harder.

At the urging of her doctor, she finally took her FMLA full-time, a full seven weeks before the birth of her son. When she came back to work a month and a half later, T-Mobile reportedly fired her:

The reason?  Rifkin says she was summarily fired after she failed to remove an extra-charge feature from a customer’s account, the commission for which was 12 cents. She says the rare error occurred when she either forgot to remove the charge or removed another charge instead.

Kristi got no severance from her long-time employer. And the entire time that she was on the only federal maternity leave that is granted in the United States, she panicked about the well-being of her family:

When I stopped working, we worried about our strained finances and how we were going to pay our family’s bills. But I had to do what was best for me and my baby.

I now have a very healthy son. But I wanted to tell my story because this is why paid medical and sick leave is so important. No one should have to go through what I did.

Like many women in her situation, Kristi has no plans to sue the company because it’s too expensive. (It’s also worth noting that Tennessee is an at-will employee state).

But such stories, of which there never seems to be shortage of, are what make legislation like the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act of the utmost importance. That way the next time an underprivileged pregnant lady needs to vomit, her employers will be forced to do more than, say, hand her a trashcan.

Bug your Congress about the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act here

(photo: Derek Jensen / Shutterstock)