Sometimes, bosses have strange expectations for their employees.

In this situation, a business owner fired their pregnant employee over some minor issues, and the Reddit comments do not disappoint.

Here’s the full story…

AITA for firing a pregnant employee?

Hello. I (38F) own a gym. I have five instructors who work for me, as well as myself and my boyfriend who instruct classes.

There was one employee, “Erica”, who told me that she was pregnant, but that she wanted to continue instructing classes for as long as possible.

She, like all of my other employees, are not full time employees- they get paid per class.

Erica has a full time job as a preschool teacher, and she originally would come here after work 4 times a week to teach two classes a night, as well as Saturday mornings, and sometimes Sundays, depending on need.

This is where things start to get weird…

All classes are about an hour and a half. I expect my employees to get here 15 minutes before their class starts and stay 15 minutes after at least. They are paid $20/class.

Early on, Erica told me that she was going to be dropping one of her Thursday classes, which began at 7:30. Her reasoning was that it ended too late.

she said that after class and cleaning the gym (the last class of the night needs to clean/close up the gym) she wasn’t getting out until about 9:00/9:15, and she was too tired.

I allowed her to drop the class, but since this was her assigned shift I couldn’t find anyone else to agree to cover it, and because of this I had to take over her class, meaning I was at the gym from open until close.

There was another issue, though…

The next incident happened a few months later.

While instructing, it is policy for our instructors to wear a shirt with either the name of our gym on it, or just plain black.

I came into the gym while Erica was instructing to find her wearing an olive green tank top. I pulled her aside and reminded her to please wear a shirt with the gym’s logo on it.

She responded that none of them that she had fit over her belly anymore. I did not believe this-I had seen her wearing shirts that she had been wearing pre-pregnancy at this point.

But all I told her was that she could also wear a plain black shirt; to which she replied (a little annoyed) that this was the only shirt she had available at the moment, and she thought dark green would be close enough to black.

I told her no, if our policy was ‘black or dark green’ I would have told her that, and it wasn’t a surprise she would be teaching a class that day, so she should’ve been prepared.

I could tell she was annoyed by this, and the rest of her class her energy was definitely off.

Things finally came to a head…

The last straw happened a few weeks after that.

I got a text from a member at 5:55 (class began at 6) that nobody was at the gym and she couldn’t get in.

I called Erica to see where she was and she said that she was running late, and that she’d be there in 10 minutes.

Since I expect my employees to be there 15 minutes early, this would make her 25 minutes late.

I told her not to bother, that if she was going to continue to let her performance slip there was no need for her to continue working for us.

Was I the AH?

Let’s see what Reddit users think…

This commenter doesn’t think these are fireable issues.

Another Reddit user thinks they should relax a little.

Several people pointed out the bad pay.

And this user had things to say about the difficulty of pregnancy.

Sounds like she needs to really think about how she treats her employees!

Or she’s going to be short more than one employee in the future.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.