Nichole Foley had worked at Google for well over a decade when she was laid off in the fall, as part of yet another round of layoffs at the tech giant. “I had never had a bad experience,” she says of her tenure at Google. “I drank the Kool-Aid. I loved working there.”
Then she learned she was losing her job while she was still out on maternity leave and just as her child turned 10 weeks old.
It had already been a tumultuous few months. Foley had experienced a devastating loss when her brother died one week before she gave birth. At the time, Google had granted her four weeks of bereavement leave in addition to the six-plus months of parental leave she had already secured. When she was laid off, however, all that changed: Over a call with someone from the people team, Foley was told the company would no longer honor the bereavement portion of her leave.
“The meeting was over Zoom, and the woman was just so cold,” she says of her conversation. “The fact that she told me that I had to take out my bereavement leave when I lost my brother? That part has truly stuck with me through this whole process.” (Google declined to comment on the record for this story and would not comment on the circumstances of specific employees.)
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