(Canada)…right before she was supposed to come back from mat leave. She’s worked for them since she graduated university, started at reception, worked her way up (almost always performing the job of more than one person), has done many roles like admin, HR, payroll, and I believe she was doing corporate training for the last few years. She was dedicated and excelled in every single department she was in. I think this would have been the 15th year she worked for this company had this not happened. I’ve always thought they paid her peanuts too.
So technically this is illegal and of course they’ve offered her a severance package (6 months salary of peanuts). She can’t claim EI coming off mat leave here and also has a 5 year old kid whose sperm donor has never paid a penny of child support and of course the new baby too (who thankfully has a real father in every sense of the word). Recently she had made a whole plan with the company about her schedule being flexible to be able to drive her daughter to and from school and to work from home those days. That’s going to difficult/maybe impossible to find in a new job. Also difficult/impossible to arrange new childcare now that this has happened (childcare is really hard to find in our city even with lots of notice).
The company told her her old job has been taken by the woman who had replaced her for her mat leave and that they do technically have a position for her to come back too. But everyone knows this “new position” is BS (she says they just stammer and don’t really say anything when she’s asked them to name or describe the new role) it’s just a way to force her hand to accept the severance package.
She is speaking to an employment lawyer. He says she has a good case and he thinks they would win but I feel like any lawyer would just say that. So I thought I’d ask you lovely folks what you thought: do y’all think it would be worth the time/money/effort to fight this? Or would the BS “new position” be enough for the company to side step the laws? Thanks in advance