CALIFORNIA PREGNANCY DISCRIMINATION LAW
The California Fair Employment and Housing Act explicitly prohibits
employers from harassing, demoting, terminating, or otherwise
discriminating against any employee for becoming pregnant, or for
requesting or taking pregnancy leave. The Act applies to all employers
that regularly employed five (5) or more full-time employees in the
preceding year.
If you are subjected to unlawful harassment or discrimination on the
basis of pregnancy, you may be entitled to recover damages for emotional
distress, lost wages, punitive damages and attorney’s fees.
In addition, the California Pregnancy Disability Leave Law ("PDLL") requires
California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for employees
actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions. This leave can
be taken all at once or intermittently. It is important to note that California's
PDLL requires California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for
employees actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions even if
the employer's policies do not grant employees suffering from other short-term
disabilities a similar amount of leave. In other words, unlike the federal Pregnancy
Discrimination Law ("PDL"), California's PDLL requires that California employers give
pregnant workers special, rather than simply equal treatment.
In California, once the employee has given birth she may be entitled to an additional
12-weeks of leave "for the reason of the birth of a child" under the California Family
Rights Act ("CFRA"), which is California's version of the FMLA. Entitlement to CFRA leave
for birth of a child depends on, 1) whether the employer employs more than 50 employees
within a seventy five mile radius; and 2) Whether the employee worked more than 1250 hours
in the 12 months preceding the first day of the requested CFRA leave or any pregnancy
disability leave; and 3) Whether the employee has more than one year of service with the employer.
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