The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Family Dollar Stores of North Carolina, alleging the retailer fired a pregnant employee for requesting time off rather than accommodate her medical emergency. According to the EEOC’s complaint, a customer service representative in Greenville experienced pregnancy-related medical issues, including vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure and swelling, on her day off. Her doctor referred her to a high-risk clinic and told her to stay off work until an appointment three days later. Instead, her store manager demanded a doctor’s note that same night, a New Year’s Eve, and fired her when she could not produce one. At the appointment days later, the employee learned she had miscarried. The lawsuit’s allegations have not been adjudicated.
The EEOC alleges the conduct violates the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy-related limitations absent undue hardship, and separately bars firing an employee for requesting one. “Firing a worker for requesting time off to address urgent pregnancy-related medical concerns is not only unlawful, it is indefensible,” said Catherine Eschbach, acting EEOC general counsel. Regional attorney Melinda C. Dugas added that while employers may request medical documentation in some circumstances, they “may only do so when it is reasonable under the circumstances,” a standard the agency says a same-night demand on a holiday failed to meet.
The original insight here is procedural: this is one of the more detailed PWFA “unreasonable documentation demand” patterns the agency has publicized, and it draws a specific line HR teams can use. A same-night documentation deadline, especially outside business hours, can turn a routine leave request into a violation on its own, independent of whether the underlying accommodation was warranted. Pregnancy-related enforcement has become one of the EEOC’s more active fronts this year, and paired with recent accommodation-denial settlements in other protected categories, the message to frontline managers is consistent: a documentation deadline the employee cannot reasonably meet is itself legal exposure, not a neutral policy.
