My wife is pregnant right now. She works in CT, and we live in NY. The CT maternity rules allow her 16 weeks of leave. We plan to have her use that. Since she informed her director about being pregnant, she has been treated horribly (we can deal with that). However, she was forced a few weeks ago to plan out her pregnancy (due in mid May) and leave schedule and also request all of this years vacation.
A co-worker is also due in mid May, but is a part-time employee (3 days/wk). The co-worker was told to provide the same schedule, and was actually in the same meeting with the director when they had to present the info.
Following the meeting, my wife was told her request for vacation was denied and they were also forcing her to use 9 of 17 vacation days during leave. The co-worker will be forced to use 3 of 10 vacation days during leave. Every woman in the group over the past 10 years has had a child, even as recently as a year ago. Nobody has ever been forced to use vacation time. In fact, the director was even paid full pay for her leave (before she was director). The co-worker is missing out on 1 week of vacation (3 days) and my wife is missing out just under 2 weeks.
Other than the fact that it doesn't make sense to remove these vacation days from use because she will need days off with a small baby, is there any other problems with this scenario? I suspect that the company can do anything they want in this situation. But the fact that the treatment is so different to my wife than it has been to anyone else in the past is really annoying. Even the co-worker didn't have this issue last child.

Sorry - large corporation with thousands of employees

Thank you.

bt0510

CT and federal FMLA allow the employer to require employees to use any paid leave that is available as part of their time off in order, so the employer could legally require to use all of her available time off during her FMLA-covered leave. The fact that the employer hasn't done so in the past doesn't mean that they cannot do so going forward.