Disabled II — Playing By The Rules?
I spent another half an hour on the phone with HR. They’ve upped they ante.
The rules, if you’ll recall from part I of this rant, are that if you’re disabled during the focal review period, you are ineligible for raises, etc, until you come back, at manager’s discretion. I happen to think this is ridiculous, since the timing of my pregnancy is random (basically), and it’s discriminatory to hold a penalty over my head because I happen to have gotten pregnant when I did. People who take vacation time are not penalized, and it’s a similar situation. But because the state feels that pregnancy equals disability, and since disability is seldom of finite duration (unlike maternity, sigh), they feel the need to protect themselves. I understand it within the disability context, but I find it to be highly irritating in this circumstance.
So… I figured out during my last two pregnancies that if I were to go on disability (maternity), then go off and go onto vacation for the focal review period, then to go back on maternity (disability), it’d preserve my general sense of fairness, dot all the correct “i’s”, and be done with the charade.
However, the charade has escalated. No one can tell me when, precisely, the “focal review period” is. No one has dates. Nowhere on the HR website, nowhere in the manual they have for the phone center folks, nowhere, are there actual dates that define the “focal review period”. Everyone’s sure it’s in June or July. No one can say precisely when. But everyone can see clearly that if I’m on disability (maternity), I miss out, and it creates more paperwork and hassle for my manager, and some financial loss for me, potentially.
Seriously uncool.
The gentleman I just got off the phone with took 20 minutes trying to find the information. Finally, he asked me why I cared. So I explained. He could tell me that if I was out on leave for more than 1/4 of the total focal review period, I was ineligible, but he was, again, completely unable to define “focal review period” as a set of calendar dates.
So everyone’s clear that there are penalties and I will suffer them, but absolutely no one can tell me what the rules we’re playing by are. Frankly, I’m beginning to feel ever-so-slightly oppressed.
The gentleman, whose curiosity is piqued, promises to call me back tomorrow, “after he’s jumped on the focal guys”. I’m looking forward to finding a nice, simple answer. Normally, this kind of sparring intrigues me, but at this point, I’m baffled at the inconsistency. I am very lucky, in that my manager rocks, and I’m not actually worried about the penalties of the situation. It’s more a “fighting the principle of the thing” than an actual fight for my check, but frankly, it’s unfair to put myself and my manager in that position. I’m dependent on the kindliness, reasonability, and sense of fair play that my manager has, which is not a luxury everyone has. What about women who get pregnant and work for rules-based creatures? How do they fare? And again, I’d have known none of this, but for my prior two pregnancies. The information is not at all forthcoming.
So stay tuned, mommies and iconoclasts. This could get entertaining.
I can say that when I was on “maternity leave” it was a big bummer in the “financial” regard as well. I happened to be out over Thanksgiving, Christmas and the “break” that is a gift from the company. Well, guess what, you don’t get the gift, and you don’t get the holidays, they count as days of disability at the reduced pay. AND, in the state I live in the long term disability/FMLA is not covered by the company - according to HR. It is a crazy system, and it has deteriorated significantly throughout the lives of my children - which has only been 5.5 years. It’s not just a reflection of the company, it’s a reflection of the state of health care as well. First child, no copay, no charge - 100% reimbursed. Second child, 2.5 years later, $500 copay, 100% reimbursement for most things. Third child 6 mos, $500 copay, 10-20% of all costs. My OB felt bad and actually asked us if we wanted to leave the hospital stay a day earlier. We declined b/c it was like a vacation that we would never really get again with #3.