I’m based in UK where we have pretty generous paid leave (paid maternity/paternity and 20+ paid days holiday a year)
This happened to a coworker of mine, he’s been with the company 8 years and is one of our most talented programmers (the kind that is the only one who knows how some legacy code works and stuff will probably break without him).
Last year his wife had a baby. He had carefully researched our company’s paternity policy and turns out in the UK you can split your leave between both partners. Usually the fathers take max 2 weeks off and the mothers take up to a year (company pays for first half, government subsidises second half at lower rate). But you don’t have to do it this way, the mother can “give” some of her leave to the father.
In my coworkers case he arranged to take 10 weeks off to help his wife recover and spend time with his newborn. Here’s where the fuck up happened – the baby was 1 week late. As a Dad he’s not allowed to take leave before baby gets here, so if baby doesn’t arrive on time (as they commonly don’t) you would assume his leave would shift to the birth date, right? Wrong! HR decided to dig their heals in on this one. So even though he had worked a whole extra week he was meant to have off (because baby wasn’t here yet) they wouldn’t give him that week at the other end, even though he’d booked 10 weeks and only taken 9.
Long story short, it got really messy, he got ACAS involved (UK’s employment tribunal body) and they threatened the company with a sexual discrimination lawsuit as there’s no way they’d have pulled this shit if he was a woman. HR very quickly backed down and gave him his leave.
The whole experience left such a bitter taste in his mouth that 6 months later he’s now leaving. In his exit interview he let HR know exactly why he was leaving, because they decided to fuck over a loyal employee over 5 measly days of leave, and he had to spend WEEKS sorting it out when he should have been caring for his newborn baby and supporting his wife.
5 days and a possible lawsuit cost us the best programmer we had. Was it worth it,
HR?