Some people don’t respond well to bad news, and usually that ends up causing more problems.

What would you do if your boss fired you because you were pregnant and needed a change in job duties, but then she refused to pay out for her contract?

That is what happened to the campaign manager in this story, so she reached out to a lawyer and got what she was entitled to.

She is smart for standing up for her rights, and it is great that it all worked out so well. Read through the full story below and see what you think.

Boss fired me for being pregnant, I’m the one who gets paid in the end

A few years ago, during Covid, was a tough year for my family.

COVID was a difficult time for most people.

My husband went from six figures supporting our family on his salary alone while we pocketed my entire salary to losing his job for 8 months.

I work in political campaigning, which means I work on short-term contracts as an independent contractor.

She is doing well for herself.

In other words if we lose an election I move onto the next race. I made a pretty good name for myself working on the lower levels of a campaign and moving up quickly.

In my state, this year there were statewide elections and I caught a lucky break and ended up the Campaign Manager on a statewide race.

Wow, she is clearly quite impressive.

I am the youngest CM (24F) to run a statewide race in about the last 20 years. When the primary came up, we lost the election by 200 votes.

While we lost the campaign, coming so close to winning and my age made me kind of a superstar in my field. After we lost, I had offers from all over the state for jobs.

She has a couple of good options, here.

The problem is I had just bought a house and wasn’t looking to relocate (like you often have to do in politics) or the positions weren’t high enough coming off being the top dog as the higher positions were already filled.

I got an offer to join a local campaign (so no relocation) but the salary was lower than what I was used to, I would however, be the CM again.

What an awful thing to be judgmental about.

However, I learned quickly my boss had a “holier than thou” personality. She made several comments about how “real” women breast feed and have natural births.

I would later be able to do neither and it really screwed with my emotional well being. I don’t have time to list all the red flags but I was literally just waiting until my husband got a job to exit.

There is a lot of work to do here.

The campaign hadn’t been built out at all. There was no one other than the candidate. I ended up building out our entire team, consultant, fundraiser, staff, ect.

Luckily, I have made a lot of powerful connections in my time. I signed my contract and sent it in with the salary we had agreed on with the stipulation that if we raised enough money 3 months down the line my salary would be raised, but could not be lowered at any point.

She is really going through a lot.

Just a few weeks prior, I had also found out that I was pregnant and my due date was the week of the election and just a week after joining the campaign I was also in a serious car accident.

Luckily, my pregnancy was safe but I herniated a disc in the car accident and due to my pregnancy there were very few things that could be done as far as helping my back or pain management.

It looks like everything is running smoothly.

If I did my job right that shouldn’t be an issue because my job can essentially be handled from home and staff could do the rest.

I had the team working in lock step and I was proud of the work I was doing even though only about 10% of my views aligned with the campaign. Then we hit a snag.

 

The candidate’s husband got deployed to a rather dangerous place for a month and she completely checked out. She stopped fundraising, which means that everything comes to a halt in campaigning.

She stopped putting in the leg work to win. We also lost our only lower staff member during this time. We knew she was worried about her husband, so no one on the team tried to push back very hard.

Why would she say this?

Eventually her husband came back and it was go time. There wasn’t a minute to waste and I was back to getting our operation working full speed.

One day she calls me up to tell me how 20 years ago her first job as a private school teacher was making as much money as I was now.

She can’t keep up with all of this.

I also live in an expensive DC suburb, not the backwoods where she grew up. I have multiple college degrees and this job offers no benefits unlike teaching. Not comparable at all. This is when I realized there might be a problem.

A couple weeks later, I told her I would need to take a step back from doing the other staff members job (mostly door knocking) because of my injured back but that we would hire someone.

It is time for the candidate to step up.

Unfortunately, due to the lack fundraising it made it hard to pay anyone else and those duties fell on her. CM’s do not typically door knock.

We had a team meeting with the entire team and I started pressuring the candidate about all the things she wasn’t doing and there was a legitimate meltdown.

She started yelling at me about how I wasn’t doing my job and her my pregnancy wasn’t her problem and how I was the reason everything was failing and then hung up on the entire team.

Let’s see how she handles this.

This is where the malicious compliance comes in. After this, I decided to take a step back from doing all the duties that are typically handled by lower level staff and just focused on doing my job duties which weren’t being appreciated.

I pretty much went radio silent and she kept nitpicking at everything. Everyone on the campaign started to grow uneasy but I told them to just hold out.

This candidate is an awful person.

Well, sure enough she calls me up and says, “Since you are pregnant and can no longer door knock you can either work for (state minimum wage) or you can find a new job.”

Mind you, she knew my husband had been out of work for 8 months and thought I had no options at this point, but what she didn’t know is that my husband had gotten a job offer that exact day.

So, I stopped her right there and thanked her for the opportunity and told her I would be working my contractually obligated 30 day notice at my current salary and then leaving the campaign.

This person is not putting up with this abuse.

She then began to scream at me about how she wasn’t paying me a dime more and started listing off a list of issues she had with the way I was doing my job.

I stopped her. Thanked her once again and told her all of my finishing tasks would be completed when I received payment for the last month I worked (Yes, she was a month behind on paying me) as well as payment for the 30 day notice that she was legally required to pay me whether I continued working or not.

The candidate is becoming unhinged.

I waited a few hours and she never finalized my termination in writing, so I sent her a termination letter thanking her for the opportunity and once again repeating everything we had discussed on the phone.

She sent me a nasty email again reiterating that I wouldn’t be paid for the previous month or 30 days and listed about 10 things that I had done to be terminated, including that I didn’t wear make-up to work every day.

Things could not have gone better.

I decided to send this email to the rest of the team and sure enough everyone quit except for the consultant. In 5 minutes she lost everyone she had.

Then a friend of mine offered me my dream job working for him, so all in all it worked out in my favor within 5 minutes of being fired.

How could a candidate be so foolish.

Well, here where things get tricky. I realize that my contract that obligates her to pay me for the 30 days’ notice isn’t signed and I’m screwed.

Well, sure enough in her fit of rage she starts emailing everyone talking badly about me the only problem is I still have access to the campaign email and I’m seeing every email she is sending.

Emails saying that she wants to keep me on staff but that I need to take less money, and that I shouldn’t have been “dishonest” about my pregnancy, so clearly I wasn’t doing my job that badly, she just wanted to pay a pregnant woman less.

Maybe the candidate should have put this much effort into her own work.

She also asks the consultant for a list of things that I did wrong on the campaign so that she will have cause not to pay me my contract.

I notice that the consultant never replies to this email. He tells her that if she want to fight it to send him a copy of the contract and he will have a lawyer take a look at it.

Well sure enough she sends him a signed copy of the contract and once again my contract is valid and she now has to pay me my severance.

The ammo she needs for a lawsuit is literally going to her inbox.

She has given me every piece of ammunition I need to get paid at this point as well as wage a discrimination suit for referencing my pregnancy as a reason for termination.

I hire a lawyer. She continues to pester me about turning over all of my work, the thing is since I’m an independent contractor I only owe her a final product if I get paid.

I reiterate that she isn’t getting anything until I’ve been paid and she can take it up with my lawyer. She begins slandering me to everyone I know and continuing to send emails about me that I’m just collecting.

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She is just not giving up.

She then starts calling every friend she has to bully me into giving her what she wants. My response to all of them is, “talk to my lawyer”.

In one final ditch effort she has the consultant call me begging me to turn over the stuff, the problem is that the consultant and I are personal friends and he’s really unhappy working for her but has contractual obligations.

Things are going from bad to worse for the candidate.

I tell him to tell her the same thing, “talk to my lawyer”. Five minutes later I get a call back from him saying that she has fired him because he refused to throw me under the bus and make up excuses for my termination when he believes I was wrongfully terminated.

She fires him too and now he’s out of his obligations. He also tells me that the lawyer she sent the contract over to said to pay me.

This boarders on harassment.

In a matter of two weeks she is once again at square one with no one on her side, she is out of money and struggling.

She finally emails me at 11pm that she is willing to pay me. Its nighttime and I don’t work for her anymore, so I decide I don’t need to respond at that moment.

Well she starts calling me incessantly and texting me, all of which I’m ignoring. By the time I wake up in the morning I have 20 texts and 5 missed calls. I tell her that I will need to talk to my lawyer at this point and I’ll get back to her after he responds.

It is illegal to file a false police report.

Well, she goes nuclear. Twenty-minutes later I get a call from the police. She is claiming I have been embezzling campaign funds and stealing her data.

I have to get my lawyer on the phone and explain the whole situation and why this is a false claim.

I offer the bank account information for the funds she claimed I stole and proved that they were sitting right there in her account, she just doesn’t know how to access them because I’m usually the one who does that.

Finally, she is getting paid.

The police officer thinks she is nuts at this point… because she is… but then informs her that it considered larceny to withhold my pay and asks me if I would like to press charges.

I say “If she refused to pay then yes”. Within two days I received a check in the mail with my payment and I turned everything over.

It is no surprise that she didn’t win the election.

The funny thing is that my 30 day notice pay was actually more money than if I had finished out the contract with the reduced pay she wanted to pay me.

I got an extra $700 and didn’t have to work for her for the remainder of the time. She ended up losing her election in a swing district by 15 points.

Some people just go crazy when they don’t get what they want. And it usually only makes things worse.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say.

Campaigning is hard work, but candidates need to practice self-control.

She should have gotten a lot more than just her payment.

This commenter is exactly right, though.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who wants to argue about an item they chose not being on sale.

Here is someone who loves this story, but it is a little scary.

This is exactly what I was thinking, though.

It is kind of scary that someone like this is even able to run for office. The last thing anyone needs is an unhinged person in a position of power.

The sad reality, however, is that most elected representatives are like this.