my boss told me I might be laid off before I take parental leave

A reader writes:

I have been working for three years at a well-regarded startup with an excellent culture. For most of my tenure, the department consisted of my skip manager (Jeff), my manager (Sarah), and me. Last year, we added a lateral colleague (Ned). Ned and I share extremely similar duties and make within $5,000 of each other, and the workload has evened out beautifully.

My relationship with Sarah has always been odd. She is a first-time manager who seems entirely uninterested in actual management or the professional growth of her reports. She is enthusiastic but incredibly disorganized, takes extensive time off at a whim for household errands, and brings a massive amount of personal drama to work. Over the last year, she has been out on various personal leaves for about six of the last 12 months. She also has very loose lips about other colleagues, to the point where I’ve had to flag it to HR in the past.

Despite this, I’ve achieved great accolades, receive glowing praise from colleagues and leaders, and have led high-visibility projects to success. When I advocated for a raise last year, she told me she didn’t think we gave out raises. Months later, she proudly proclaimed she worked really hard to get me a 2% raise. I later discovered that this raise was standard across the company, and communicated months prior to management. Sarah had simply forgotten to tell me about it and played it off as a win. I now go to other departments to get the basic institutional information I need to do my job. I’ve become a resource for Ned in this regard as well.

Here is the current crisis: I am pregnant and disabled. I am scheduled to take our company’s six-month parental leave later this year.

Recently, before Sarah left for an unplanned extended absence, she dropped a bomb on me. In a 1:1, she claimed that all four of us could be at risk due to an org-wide RIF she thinks is on the horizon. She explicitly told me to start sending my resume out. I asked how certain she was, and she said it was just a hunch that she and Jeff had, but I know that tech layoffs are increasingly common lately.

I asked if she had given Ned the same warning. She admitted she hadn’t because she didn’t think he was likely to be laid off. I pointed out that since she and Jeff would be the ones making these departmental decisions, it sounded less like the whole department was at risk, and more like I was being singled out. She scrambled, claiming she was worried for her own job too, and then bizarrely claimed she might voluntarily resign so Ned could take her role to save the department. (For context, Ned and I are structurally parallel, but I have more tenure at the company, and her role could easily be split between the two of us).

Sarah is independently wealthy and could walk away fine if she chose to leave, which makes me irate. She knows I am pregnant, she knows I am disabled, and she is insinuating that my leave and my financial stability is on the chopping block while Ned’s is safe. And now she’s walking out the door for almost an entire quarter, leaving me to stew in this.

I’ve reached out to my network, but the market is brutal. Finding a new role while visibly pregnant is incredibly difficult, and even if I land something, I would likely forfeit my parental leave. If I am targeted in a layoff, I would want to negotiate a severance that includes my parental leave, given the optics of laying off the only pregnant, marginalized person on the team.

My plan right now is to keep my head down, keep delivering excellent work, and hope this is just my manager’s classic paranoia and total lack of professional boundaries. But part of me wants to go to HR after touching base with Jeff, because dropping this kind of alarmist, targeted insinuation on a pregnant employee before vanishing feels wildly inappropriate.

Is going to HR worth a shot to get ahead of the narrative? How do I handle the ambiguity and reality if I’m laid off?

Go to HR today.

Your manager threatened you with a layoff while you’re disabled and pregnant — first claiming the whole team was at risk and then telling you that she didn’t think the able-bodied man on the team would be cut.

First, whether or not layoffs really are on the horizon, your company isn’t going to be pleased that a manager is spreading rumors about them.

Second, they’re really not going to be pleased that she’s giving the one pregnant, disabled person on the team the impression that she’s being singled out.

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t assume that Sarah and Jeff would be the ones making any decisions about who to cut — while it’s possible they’d be asked for input, it’s also possible they’d have no input at all. But either way, when Sarah speaks to you as your manager she’s representing the company — and at a minimum this is very bad optics for them, with the potential to be a real legal liability.

If you do end up getting laid off, a lawyer can help you negotiate for a stronger severance package; you have some leverage because of the whole situation. But for all we know, Sarah could be talking out of her ass. Or she might not be. Regardless, talk to HR and tell them you’re extremely alarmed and concerned she’s singling you out.

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