Not fired, but got chosen from a team for contract termination.
Was part of a team on contract doing software development for a hospital conglomerate’s internal tools when my second kid was born six weeks early. They made it clear that they were totally fine with me working reduced hours while we dealt with that. We were based halfway across the continent from them, so all our work was done remotely anyway. I put in about four weeks of reduced hours from the NICU, then came back up to full time (somewhat off-schedule, since we had a new baby in the house).
Come budget time, they felt they needed to reduce the team size. They felt we’d all done outstanding work - so I got the axe, because of my “reduced availability”.
The fun with contract work is that there are often laws in place to protect the employee, but there’s always some caveat that the employer can use to just not extend the contract anymore.
In Australia the law is that you can only extend a contract worker once, with what I assume is the intention that you would then hire them permanently if you liked their work enough to extend them. What actually ends up happening is that contract workers are now looking for jobs more often because companies LOVE contract workers, but hate the idea of offering anyone a permanent position. It’s cheaper for them to roll through inexperienced contractors.
Not fired, but got chosen from a team for contract termination.
Was part of a team on contract doing software development for a hospital conglomerate’s internal tools when my second kid was born six weeks early. They made it clear that they were totally fine with me working reduced hours while we dealt with that. We were based halfway across the continent from them, so all our work was done remotely anyway. I put in about four weeks of reduced hours from the NICU, then came back up to full time (somewhat off-schedule, since we had a new baby in the house).
Come budget time, they felt they needed to reduce the team size. They felt we’d all done outstanding work - so I got the axe, because of my “reduced availability”.
I don’t know where you live but that sounds illegal as fuck
The fun with contract work is that there are often laws in place to protect the employee, but there’s always some caveat that the employer can use to just not extend the contract anymore.
In Australia the law is that you can only extend a contract worker once, with what I assume is the intention that you would then hire them permanently if you liked their work enough to extend them. What actually ends up happening is that contract workers are now looking for jobs more often because companies LOVE contract workers, but hate the idea of offering anyone a permanent position. It’s cheaper for them to roll through inexperienced contractors.
Probably America. Employment rights are a fairytale over there
Fairytale? We don’t even have that.