Evil Employers

I wanted to ask you all some advice for a co-worker of mine. She was pregnant and has had her baby. Now that she is on her Maternity Leave the owners of our company called her and asked her to sign termination papers so that they could terminate her employment. They told her that she would also be signing re-instatement papers with a re-hire date. They said if she didn't do this that she'd have to pay the fees to re-imburse the company for what they had to pay in order to keep her as an employee during the time she was out. This sounds fishy to me. As far as I knew Georgia law requires that you keep people on leave as employees and give them Maternity leave even if it's not paid leave and the only requirement is that they be an employee. I checked federal law as well and found that the Civil Rights Act had an amendment added to it in 1978 requiring that you had to continue employee benefits and employment.
I read the whole thing and there was not one part which stated anything about a time limit of being an employee. Our company told my co-worker that if she had not been an employee for at least a year that they didn't have to pay for the fees of keeping you as an employee. If any of you know of some sort of law or clause stating this one year employement requirement let me know. I found one website just now which mentioned the Family Medical Leave Act and said that your employer doesn't even have to give you maternity leave if you haven't been there a year. The thing is this company did give my co-worker leave so I would think that logically they should be obligated to provide insurance during that time without re-imbursement. The law says they have to do that for employees on maternity leave if they allowed them to take the leave. If they don't allow you to take the leave they have that option unless you have been an employee for at least a year.
Let me know if you guys find out/know anything.

---

Technorati tags:
Maternity Leave, work issues