Everything about Debrahlee Lorenzana is hot. Even her name sizzles. At five-foot-six and 125 pounds, with soft eyes and flawless bronze skin, she is J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack meets Audrey Hepburn elegance—a head-turning beauty.

Debrahlee Lorenzana. Photo by Saswat Pattanayak || WomensRightsNY.com

In many ways, the story of her life has been about getting attention from men—both the wanted and the unwanted kind. But when she got fired last summer from her job as a banker at a Citibank branch in Midtown—her bosses cited her work performance—she got even hotter. She sued Citigroup, claiming that she was fired solely because her bosses thought she was too hot.

This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.

As Lorenzana’s lawsuit puts it, her bosses told her that “as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear.”

“Men are kind of drawn to her,” says Tanisha Ritter, a friend and former colleague who also works as a banker and praises Lorenzana’s work habits. “I’ve seen men turn into complete idiots around her. But it’s not her fault that they act this way, and it shouldn’t be her problem.”
Because Citibank made Lorenzana sign a mandatory-arbitration clause as a condition of her employment, the case will never end up before a jury or judge. An arbitrator will decide. Citibank officials won’t comment on the suit.

Her attorney, Jack Tuckner, who calls himself a “sex-positive” women’s-rights lawyer, is the first one to say his client is a babe. But so what? For him, it all boils down to self-control. “It’s like saying,” Tuckner argues, “that we can’t think anymore ’cause our penises are standing up—and we cannot think about you except in a sexual manner—and we can’t look at you without wanting to have sexual intercourse with you. And it’s up to you, gorgeous woman, to lessen your appeal so that we can focus!”

This isn’t your typical sexual-harassment lawsuit, if there is such a thing. For one thing, such suits often claim that women are coerced into looking more sexy or are subjected to being pawed. Lorenzana claims that her bosses basically told her she was just too attractive. And when she raised hell and refused to do anything about it—as if there was anything she really could do about it—she lost her job.

Debbie Lorenzana—whose mother is Puerto Rican and father is Italian—came to New York from Puerto Rico 12 years ago. She was 21 and pregnant, and had a degree as an emergency medical technician from a technical college in Manatí, a small city on the northern coast. The father, she says, didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the baby. So she moved back to the States, where she had lived in her mid-teens (pinballing between relatives’ houses and group homes), and took care of her elderly grandparents in Connecticut. After her son was born, she moved to Queens to stay with a friend. Then she got her first job in finance: working as a sales representative at the Municipal Credit Union, in 2002. She moved to Jersey City and worked long hours. She was successful.

In April 2003, the Municipal Credit Union named her its sales rep of the month. On the other hand, she says, a manager once called her into his office to ask her opinion of a photograph. The picture he called up on his computer was of his penis. She complained about the incident. In her June 2003 resignation letter—written just two months after she was honored as a top employee—she wrote, “Due to the complaint I made regarding sexual harassment, my work environment has become hostile, painful, and unbearable.”

She moved on to other jobs in the financial-services industry. After a stint selling health insurance to immigrants at Metropolitan Hospital in Queens, the hospital cited her in November 2003 for “providing world-class customer service” and for being the number one enroller in the office.
In August 2006, the district managers at Bank of America gave her a Customer Higher Standards Award on diploma paper, on which they wrote: “Debrahlee: You deserve to be recognized for going above and beyond.”

She says she loved to work, and eventually was earning close to $70,000 a year. “My ex-boyfriend says it’s my Spic pride,” she says. “As long as I have two hands and two legs, and can still walk, I will always work, so my son will have a roof over his head and food.”

And she will be well-dressed. Lorenzana is, by her own admission, a shopaholic. She shops for her work clothes at Zara, but when she has money, she says, she spends it on designer clothes. She has five closets full of Burberry, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Roberto Cavalli. In her son’s closet, there’s a row of tiny Lacoste, Dolce & Gabbana, and Ralph Lauren T-shirts. She says her love of fine clothes is a result of her growing up poor—she recalls running a high school marathon barefoot because she couldn’t afford sneakers.

Lorenzana left the workplace to get married, but that relationship went sour after a brief time, and in September 2008, she was ready to go back to work. It was the height of the Wall Street crisis, but she lucked out. She got an interview with Citibank for a job at its recently opened branch in the Chrysler Building.

At the interview, she recalls, she wore a black Armani wrap dress and simple Christian Louboutin pumps. (The dress was form-fitting and tight in the bust: She says one size up would have been too big for her.) She remembers that the branch manager, Craig Fisher, was polite, asking her about strategies for acquiring new business and whether she had other job offers. Since she already had an offer from Washington Mutual, Fisher proposed a salary of $70,000 with three weeks’ vacation, she says. Her job title was business banker, providing services to small businesses. There were three business bankers at the Chrysler Building branch; Lorenzana was the only woman.

When she started the job, she says, a colleague told her that the branch was “pretty much known for hiring pretty girls,” and that she knew Lorenzana was going to be hired from the moment she came in for her interview. “So here I am,” Lorenzana recalls, “thinking I got hired because of my capabilities, and now you’re telling me it’s because of my physical appearance? Oh, great.”

However, she liked the job, the pay, and the prospects for advancement. For the first two months, she says, she was hardly in the office—she was either out drumming up business or attending training sessions. But once she started spending more time in the office, things began to go downhill.
Interviews and her lawsuit, which was filed in November 2009, tell her story: Fisher and another manager, Peter Claibourne, started making offhanded comments about her appearance, she says. She was told not to wear fitted business suits. She should wear makeup because she looked sickly without it. (She had purposefully stopped wearing makeup in hopes of attracting less attention.) Once, she recalls, she came in to work without having blow-dried her hair straight—it is naturally curly—and Fisher told a female colleague to pass on a message that she shouldn’t come into work without straightening it.

Other problems also popped up. In order to provide services to a client, a banker needs to become certified to do things like open a checking account or take a loan application. Lorenzana says Fisher didn’t send her to enough of the required training sessions, which meant she wasn’t authorized to do something as simple as order a debit card for a client and was forced to rely on her colleagues for favors. “When I complained,” Lorenzana says, “Craig would say, ‘Just go ahead and bring in new business.’ So I went out every day and looked for business.” But then, she says, when clients would come into the branch asking for her—or would fax papers to the branch with her name on them—Fisher would give those hard-won accounts to male colleagues.
In late 2008, she recalls, the two managers called her into Fisher’s office. She remembers that she was wearing a red camisole, beige pants, and a navy suit jacket. This is how she tells it: “They said, ‘Deb, we need to talk to you about your work attire. . . . Your pants are too tight.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, my pants are not too tight! If you want to talk about inappropriate clothes, go downstairs and look at some of the tellers!’ ”

Citibank does have a dress-code policy, which says clothing must not be provocative, but does not go into specifics, and managers have wide discretion. But Lorenzana points out that, unlike her, some of the tellers dressed in miniskirts and low-cut blouses. “And when they bend down,” Lorenzana says, “anyone can see what God gave them!”

Then the managers gave her a list of clothing items she would not be allowed to wear: turtlenecks, pencil skirts, and fitted suits. And three-inch heels. “As a result of her tall stature, coupled with her curvaceous figure,” her suit says, Lorenzana was told “she should not wear classic high-heeled business shoes, as this purportedly drew attention to her body in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers.”
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Lorenzana recalls. “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ I was like, ‘Too distracting? For who? For you? My clients don’t seem to have any problem.’ ”

The managers instructed her to wear looser clothing. Lorenzana refused. “I don’t have the money to buy a new wardrobe,” she says, referring to her work outfits. “I shop where everyone else shops—at Zara!” Lorenzana recalls leaving the meeting feeling humiliated. Other female employees “were able to wear such clothing because they were short, overweight, and they didn’t draw much attention,” she later wrote in a letter describing the meeting to Human Resources, “but since I was five-foot-six, 125 pounds, with a figure, it wasn’t ‘appropriate.’ ” She was also furious. “Are you saying that just because I look this way genetically, that this should be a curse for me?”

That same afternoon, she says, she called Human Resources. “I felt it was inappropriate for two male managers to pull me aside like that,” she says. “I felt they were attacking me. In most places, if you are going to address a woman about anything that has to do with her personal appearance, you want to address it with a female employee there.”

In the weeks that followed, Lorenzana says she called HR up to three or four times a day. An e-mail, she says, finally brought action: A human resources manager named Morgan Putman came to the branch in January and interviewed employees. Lorenzana says she had taken two pictures of female colleagues to show HR officials. One was of a woman wearing a grayish—and very short—silk dress. The other was of a woman wearing leather boots with three-inch spike heels. “Some tellers would wear their pants so tight, it was like they had a permanent wedgie,” says Lorenzana. “It was totally inappropriate.”

After the HR visit, she says, things got markedly worse. Lorenzana says her bosses made incessant comments about her clothes. She tried to dress down in ways that didn’t involve clothes—pulling her hair back, coming to work some days without makeup, but it didn’t make a difference. “I could have worn a paper bag, and it would not have mattered,” she says. “If it wasn’t my shirt, it was my pants. If it wasn’t my pants, it was my shoes. They picked on me every single day.” Still, she continued to dress up for work—her brand of femininity is also cultural. “Where I’m from,” she says, switching into Spanish to explain it, “women dress up—like put on makeup and do their nails—to go to the supermarket. And I’m not talking trashy, you know, like in the Heights. I was raised very Latin, you know? We’re feminine. A woman in Puerto Rico takes care of herself. The Puerto Rican women here put down our flag.”

According to court documents and her letters to HR, Lorenzana continued to ask for more training sessions, but didn’t get them. Meanwhile, clients whose business she had drummed up were being handed off to her colleagues. An April 2009 quarterly report showed that she was behind the other business bankers in monthly sales credits. On June 24, she received a letter saying that she was being put on final notice, that she was bringing in too little business. But there was something strange about the letter, which was signed by Craig Fisher, and which put her on probation for six months. The letter said she had come in late on June 6 and 7. This struck her as odd. She looked at the dates. They were a Saturday and a Sunday—the branch was closed on those days. In addition to raising the issue of her bosses’ unfairly giving her business to colleagues, she pointed out those incorrect dates to Human Resources.

One day in late spring 2009, Lorenzana says, Craig Fisher told her to move some files into storage in the basement from the second floor. The previous day, she recalled, a male colleague had been given the same instructions, and because there were a lot of heavy files, he came into work in flip-flops and jeans. So she brought in flip-flops. But Fisher told her that she had to take off the flip-flops and wear high heels while moving the heavy, paper-filled boxes, her suit alleges.

The high-heels incident infuriated her, she says. She was getting worn down. On June 25, at 3:30 p.m., she sent a long-winded e-mail to two regional vice presidents whom she had never met, bypassing Morgan Putman at Human Resources. It was the kind of e-mail that could have used a proofreader, one a lawyer might advise a client not to send without some serious editing. (English is not her first language.) But she summed up her experiences with Fisher and Claibourne well and talked about “the cruelty of a hostile work environment,” where she was harassed “on a daily basis.” She ended by writing that “Mr. Fisher stated he is good friends with lots of people in the organization giving me . . . reason to believe that nothing will happen to correct the situation going on at branch 357. I have requested for the second time a transfer. . . . I came to Citibank with high expectations. Please I just want to work in a fair work environment where everyone is equal. Thank you in advance for your attention in this matter.”

The VPs never responded in writing, but she sent follow-up e-mails in which she continued to report incidents at work. Less than a month after her June 25 e-mail, she was transferred to a Citibank branch at Rockefeller Center. The way she looked or dressed didn’t draw any comments there, she says, but that branch didn’t need another business banker. In mid-July, she e-mailed Morgan Putman, thanking her for the transfer, but pointing out that she was working as a telemarketer, which wasn’t her job title.

In August, her manager at the Rockefeller Center branch—a woman—sat her down and fired her. The female manager mentioned the problems related to her clothing at the previous branch. She did not mention work performance, Lorenzana says. The manager said she was sorry, but Lorenzana wasn’t fit for the culture of Citibank.

“It’s so tiring,” Lorenzana tells the Voice. “My entire life, I’ve been dealing with this. ‘Cause people say, ‘Oh, you got a job because you look that way.’ So you gotta work four times harder to prove you are capable. To prove you didn’t get this because of the way you look. First, I’m a woman, then I’m an immigrant, and I have my accent. At Citibank, when they were picking on me for every little thing, I couldn’t take it anymore!”
After she was fired, she became depressed and began panicking about how she would afford her car payments and rent, and she applied for unemployment. Last Christmas, she and her son skipped gift-giving.

Meanwhile, she continues to receive unwanted attention. She says she gets hit on constantly and walks on the street as if she were wearing body armor: forward and straight, avoiding everyone’s gaze. “If being less good-looking,” she says, “means being happy and finding love and not being sexually harassed and having a job where no one bothers you and no one questions you because of your looks, then, definitely, I’d want that. I think of that every day.”

In preparation for the lawsuit, lawyer Jack Tuckner had a professional photographer shoot her in various work outfits in his office near Wall Street. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes—they’re proper business attire. And there’s nothing wrong with Lorenzana, who looks really, really good in them.
Obviously, that shouldn’t have anything to do with how she’s judged in the workplace. But things may not be so clear when the case goes into arbitration. The practice of making employees, as a condition of employment, opt out of their right to sue the company is a common corporate strategy. Under the city’s Human Rights Law, she has to prove that “it’s more likely than not” that Citibank created a discriminatory and hostile work environment based on gender. She must demonstrate that she was treated differently based on her sartorial choices as a female and that she was fired in close proximity to her complaints of being treated differently. Citibank also has a burden of proof: that it specifically did not create a hostile work environment based on her sex and that it fired her for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons.

Lorenzana can rely on her testimony, her letters to HR, and the testimony of witnesses. Citibank can point to its disciplinary action—the final notice letter—but the letter punishes her for being late on days the bank wasn’t even open. (That’s the only disciplinary paper trail the Voice is aware of in this case.)
Lorenzana could prevail on either or both of these issues: a hostile work environment or retaliation. Tuckner says that in his experience with gender-discrimination cases, juries tend to be more sympathetic than arbitrators, if only because the typical arbitrator is a middle-aged man. There’s always the possibility that he’ll be too distracted by Lorenzana to focus on the evidence.

In conversation with Dana Rapoport, Jack Tuckner discusses criteria for the right candidate: “Gender is probably not the most important factor…. But if we get a woman who is progressive, liberal and smart, it is terrific.”

This is yet another ugly example of the excesses that the deregulation of the financial services industry has wrought. When one can become freakishly wealthy by creating nothing but smoke and mirrors, it seems to promote a sort of uber mentality in the men who buy into the notion that they must indeed be very special to have so much abundance in their lives for so doing so little. It’s a god complex—the laws—whether of Nature or the Penal Code–don’t apply to them. To paraphrase Dire Straits, these guys expect their “money for nothing” and their “chicks for free.”

That’s why Guerriero had no compunction about emailing repulsive pornography and obscene text messages to a 19-year-old who idolized him for his financial prowess. Like a rich kid spoiled rotten, he’s saying, I’m so powerful and entitled, I act on every sexual impulse I have, without shame, fear or empathy for my victims.

Click here for the Complaint (PDF)

A Village Voice Exclusive by Elizabeth Dwoskin:

Suit: Raunchy Wall Street CEO Offers to Make Young Employee ‘Cumm,’ Sends Her His Jerk-Off Video, Fires Her

A sex-crazed CEO of a Wall Street investment firm turned an aspiring stockbroker’s dream job into a “raunchy, intimidating, and sexualized” workplace that literally made her sick, according to a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court this morning.
“I wanna make u cumm like u never had is that a bad thing I know ul love it,” Thomas Guerriero, CEO and president of Guerriero Wealth Holdings Inc., texted Karen Lo, 20, this past February 2, Lo’s sex-discrimination suit claims.
When she tried to fend off his messages by saying she had a boyfriend and wanted to keep her relationship with Guerriero professional, the suit says, Guerriero subsequently texted her: “His lil dick please don’t make me touch myself thinking bou u lol at least feel me close.”

Guerriero, the founder and principal of the firm, also sent her a video showing a man masturbating to ejaculation, the suit says, and later indicated to her that he was the man in the video.
That was just part of what Lo’s suit describes as an “assaultive barrage” of text messages and the video and of actual touching, all of this taking place in the firm’s offices at 110 Wall Street.
“Guerriero had no compunction about emailing repulsive pornography and obscene text messages to a 19-year-old who idolized him for his financial prowess,” Lo’s attorney, Jack Tuckner, tells the Voice. “Like a rich kid spoiled rotten, he’s saying, ‘I’m so powerful and entitled, I act on every sexual impulse I have, without shame, fear or empathy for my victims.’ ”
“The allegations are entirely without merit,” says Brian King, an attorney for Guerriero. “This was not sexual harassment. There was some flirtation going on between her and Mr. Guerriero, but this was not sexual harassment.”
King contends that it was Lo who instigated sexual discussions between herself and other men in the office in order to trap them into saying things. “My client intends to defend this action vigorously,” says King. “Her comments are manufactured in order to gain unwarranted financial windfall.”
Lo, a student at SUNY-Stony Brook, was hired in October 2009 as an entry-level stockbroker, working for the firm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays.
She “aspired to emulate Guerriero’s professional trajectory,” her suit says. But the barrage began immediately. She fended off every advance, saying she wanted to keep things “professional.”
“I tried to keep everything he did separate from my work, because it really was my dream,” she tells the Voice. “It was really uncomfortable, but, at the end of the day, it was really my dream job . . . because I guess he would be like the shepherd leading me to wealth and success.”
With a few nightmares thrown in, according to her suit. Even after she stopped replying to his texts, the suit says, he continued to text her. He also touched her legs and left a Post-It note with a sexual message on her desk, says Tuckner. Subsequently, the suit says, she got this text message from him: “I know deep down u are curious how I could feel lol I love touching ur legs when ur near me ur sexy . . . I had a dream about u it was so real lol.”
In another example cited in the suit, when Lo sent her boss an email with a link to a news story about Wall Street bonuses, he wrote her back a note in which he said that he was thinking of her when he was drunk at a spa the previous night, and that he wanted to record and send her “another video,” but “wasn’t sure” how much she liked the last one. “I would like to try to keep things professional still,” the desperate Lo replied.
Lo, under what the suit calls “severe emotional and psychological distress,” sought counseling. In mid-February, she was fired.
Guerriero Wealth Holdings describes itself on the web as specializing in “trading and investment strategies for high net-worth individuals, professional investors, hedge funds, money managers, and institutional investors.”
Guerriero’s bio says he is a former senior vice president at First Union National Bank, now part of Wachovia. Guerriero Wealth Holdings boasts an internship program, a fellowship program, and a “Guerriero Institute of Finance.”
In the promotional material, there’s a clear emphasis on recruiting young brokers. “Mr. Guerriero’s unique ability to recruit, train, and mentor service professionals has made his training and development program one of the best in the industry,” the site says.
In a 2005 profile of Guerriero in Black Tie International, headlined “Leading the Way to Wall Street’s New Era,” he’s quoted as saying, “I believe the most successful people in this industry are the ones that refuse to be satisfied. And are willing to go that extra mile to set a new standard of excellence.”

By Kiri Blakeley, FORBES
You can take time off for health or child care issues, but where’s the corporate understanding about work disruption due to relationship turmoil?

When news broke that Sandra Bullock’s husband, Jesse James, was allegedly having an affair with a tattooed biker model, Bullock pulled out of the London premiere of her Oscar-winning movie, The Blind Side. A premiere without a film’s star might as well not be a premiere, so the studio kiboshed the entire thing. As the cheating scandal widened, Bullock canceled several other overseas premieres and an appearance on the Kids Choice Awards.

Media appearances, press junkets and premieres are generally not optional for a celebrity–they are often contractually obligated or, at the very least, considered a necessary part of the job.

Bullock is fortunate that not only does her studio, Warner Brothers, seem to be supportive of her time off, but she is also a big enough star that she’s in no danger of being rendered unemployable in the future over her ditched duties. A less bankable actor would likely not have had the same option.

And what about us average wage slaves? While it is generally acceptable in the workplace to take time off due to health reasons, child care issues, or the well-being of a parent, there is often scant corporate understanding when it comes to work disruption as a result of divorce, breakup or even general relationship turmoil.

Walking into your boss’ office and saying you’d like to take a few days off because your mother is sick (something I did in the past year) is a little different from saying you need to come to terms with the idea that your husband is schtupping a series of bimbos. Should this kind of time off be more widely available and acceptable?

Mental health experts seem divided over the issue. Irina Firstein, a New York City therapist with 20 years’ experience, says that relationship trouble should not be given the same leeway in the workplace as health issues. “These events, while very traumatic, don’t require a long time off work,” she says. “In fact, I think it is most helpful to try and continue your usual activities. This takes away some of the focus and energy on obsessively dwelling on one’s pain.”

Taking the opposite tack is Sally Wright, Ph.D., a consultant for clients like the American Psychotherapy Association, who says, “Situations involving relationship breakup are every bit as mentally and emotionally taxing as those which are characterized as ‘acceptable’ reasons. In fact they are often more difficult to deal with.”

Yet there persists the corporate and societal bias that relationship issues are not “serious,” despite reams of research indicating that divorce is on par with death in terms of emotional devastation. The Family Medical Leave Act covers certain employees whose parents or children are ill, but those suffering emotional woes take their chances when going up against an employer.

Labor attorney Jack Tuckner, who specializes in women’s rights in the workplace, represented a 26-year-old New York City woman who was fired from her company after taking nearly a month off work after her live-in boyfriend abruptly dumped her. “[The company] called her ‘weak-minded,’” says Tuckner, who settled the woman’s case.

Tuckner advises those who may need to take time off due to personal issues be honest but vague with your employer (don’t divulge all the dirty details), give your boss a time-line of when you plan to return to work (two to three weeks off is about as much as one can reasonably expect), and to document your emotional state through a doctor or mental health professional. Even then, he warns, you still risk being marginalized at work after such a leave of absence.

But perhaps the tide is shifting. The human rights laws in some states and cities require that employers must accommodate reasonable requests due to mental anxiety, and those laws are beginning to be interpreted more broadly. “Mental suffering is getting closer to being a covered disability,” says Pryor Cashman labor attorney Josh Zuckerberg. But emotional distress isn’t protected in the clear-cut way that, say, blindness is.

However, there are decent compromises that employers can make to allow employees to regain emotional footing while not being forced into the role of emotional hand-holder. Heather Gatley, who oversees human resources for staffing firm AlphaStaff, says she has seen an increase in companies that offer personal time off (PTO)–to be taken for whatever reasons, no explanation necessary–in place of sick days or vacation time. Says Gately: “It’s unreasonable to expect that employees won’t need time off every once in awhile to attend to personal issues–whether renewing a driver’s license or nurturing a broken heart.”

Still, says Gately, even employers who offer PTO can require that those who want to take advantage of it give notice “as far in advance as is possible.” Unfortunately, one can never quite plan when you may discover your spouse or partner is a cheating low life.

Kiri Blakeley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her book, Can’t Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love, will be published in January 2011.

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
The Wall Street Journal

Entrepreneurs focused on growing their businesses are sometimes caught off guard when employees start growing their families.

Sendero Business Services LP, a management-consulting firm in Dallas, wasn’t prepared when a manager became pregnant in 2007 and asked what its maternity-leave policy entailed, says co-owner and partner Ruth Farrar.

“I said, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ ” she recalls replying to the woman, because the small firm, then three years old, didn’t yet have one. She says Sendero then quickly decided to give the expectant mother two months of paid time off for maternity leave, plus other benefits.

“Our impulse was to be too generous,” says Ms. Farrar, adding that two more female employees came forward a month later announcing they were also pregnant.

When starting a small business, planning ahead in case an employee or an employee’s spouse becomes pregnant isn’t top of mind for many owners. But by taking the time to carefully research legal obligations, insurance options and other key issues early on, entrepreneurs may be able to avoid making costly mistakes.

“You don’t want to unknowingly grant something you don’t have to grant,” says Jay Zweig, an employment attorney and partner in Phoenix for law firm Bryan Cave LLP.

For example, he says business owners should be aware that under the federal government’s Family and Medical Leave Act, employers with less than 50 workers are not obligated to give paid or unpaid time off to pregnant workers.

Meanwhile, state laws vary on whether employers must continue to compensate workers while on maternity leave, says Mr. Zweig. For this reason, he cautions business owners to consult with an employment lawyer when creating a maternity-leave policy, rather than use information posted to the Web or what a former employer gave them as a guide.

Another piece of advice for business owners: Find out if you can tap your insurance provider’s disability coverage.

Tammy Wise, owner of Wise Group, a marketing firm in Cleveland, says she didn’t realize she could’ve done that when she agreed in 2004 to give her nine employees —all women—up to 12 weeks off for maternity leave at 70% of their salary for eight of those weeks.

Ms. Wise later expanded her coverage, but learned a valuable lesson this past July when her provider changed its benefits policy. She failed to read the new version carefully and when two employees took maternity leave, she discovered that coverage had dropped to four weeks from six. Had she paid closer attention, she says she would’ve adjusted her firm’s policy in this area accordingly.

Small-business bosses may also want to put some thought into how they treat expectant mothers on their staffs. Consider, for example, that last year nearly 6,200 pregnancy-discrimination complaints were filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Roughly 1,500 resulted in settlements totaling $16.8 million, the government agency reports.

Business owners may be found guilty of pregnancy bias for failing to provide an expectant worker with accommodations deemed reasonable under some state laws, such as time off for doctor visits, says Jack Tuckner, a founding partner with Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser LLP, a boutique law firm in New York specializing in women’s rights in the workpace. Others may be held accountable for treating pregnant staff members with hostility or for refusing to let them work.

“You can’t tell a woman to take time off because she’s pregnant if she’s capable of working and wants to,” says Mr. Tuckner, even if the owner’s intentions are to benefit her well-being. “Legally she can work until her water breaks.”

Finally, business owners may also want to consider ahead of time how they’ll keep their firms operating smoothly while one or more employees goes on maternity or paternity leave. Hiring freelance talent may be an option. Another may be to divide the absent employees work among remaining staffers.

But what if the business owner is the one going on leave?

James Reinhart, co-founder of ThredUp Inc., a six-month-old Web company in Cambridge, Mass., is currently grappling with this issue. His wife, a schoolteacher, is due to have their first child in July.

“The demands of a start-up mean that I can only take a few days off,” he says. “Then I have to get back at it.”

ABC News reports on Jennifer Paviglianiti’s charges of discrimination with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Jennifer Paviglianiti vs. Cafe Royale

Bartender in Topless Bar Says She Was Discriminated Against for Being Pregnant
By MARY KATHRYN BURKE and BRENNAN MCCORD

When Jennifer Paviglianiti, 29, of Centereach, N.Y., discovered she was pregnant, she hoped to wait until the three-month mark to tell her boss, John Doxey. But workplace gossip got to him first.

Once Doxey heard the news, Paviglianiti says, he immediately showed he had doubts about her work status.

Now, Paviglianiti says, she has been unfairly let go from her bartending job at the Cafe Royale gentlemen’s club. She has filed charges of discrimination with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The charges, which were received by the EEOC on February 2, say the “cause of discrimination” is based on “sex, retaliation, perceived disability, and pregnancy.” In the charges, Paviglianiti says she “encountered continual blatant discrimination,” and that Doxey told her customers are “not coming in to see sexy bartenders that are pregnant and bulging out.”

Pushed Out?
“I had a bad feeling from the beginning,” Paviglianiti tells ABC News, “I know John and once you’re on his bad side, you’re on his bad side. Two weeks before they took away my shifts he said, ‘I don’t see you making it through Thanksgiving.’”

Paviglianiti says she knew her pregnancy would put her on Doxey’s bad side. She says Doxey was making her job increasingly incompatible with pregnancy, forcing her to clean the bar with ammonia instead of cleaning fluids that are considered safer for expectant mothers.

“He also put an extra bartender on the shift, severely cutting back what I would bring home at the end of the night. He was doing everything he could to try to make me leave.”

Paviglianiti looked up pregnancy discrimination lawyers and began keeping a tape recorder in her purse at work.
“I researched online how hard it is to prove discrimination,” Paviglianiti says, “I knew if anything were to happen I would at least have a tape. And I caught him saying things out loud so he couldn’t deny it. I made sure he said that I wasn’t in trouble and my registers aren’t short.”

The Tape: Smoking Gun?

Jennifer Paviglianiti :: “I just want him to learn his lesson – he owns a business that is 90 percent women – somebody is going to get pregnant eventually. I shouldn’t have to choose between the job that pays the bills and my child. The car companies don’t care if I get laid off. If he gets away with it then a maybe anyone can get away with it.”

“A pregnant woman behind the bar, in a topless bar, I’m beginning to think that it’s hurting the registers and you’re incapable of fulfilling all of your job duties.” Doxey says on the tape released to ABC News.

“I’m not saying that you’re not trying, OK, but number one, I don’t want nothing to happen to you…they’re not coming in to see sexy bartenders that are pregnant that are bulging out, I’m sorry…”

On the tape, Paviglianiti argues with Doxey to let her stay on the job, saying she is the highest-grossing bartender at the club. Doxey agrees she is doing well but says, “Each week you’re getting bigger and bigger, and uh, more unsexy, unsexy, OK….I’m not saying that you’re not ringing the register, I just said there’s all different things and aspects, customers don’t wanna come in and see a pregnant woman behind the bar. Why can’t you get that through your head, you’re not getting it.”

Paviglianiti says once she got Doxey on tape, she knew she had enough evidence to bring a case. “I went online and typed ‘women’s rights,’” she says.

That search is how Paviglianiti found attorney Jack Tuckner.

Tuckner says Paviglianiti’s decision to tape-record Doxey was both prudent and prescient.
“This kind of thing happens all the time,” Tuckner tells ABC News, “It’s usually difficult to prove. But here we have a smoking gun. It was blatant.”

Recording a conversation, as Jennifer did, is completely legal in the state of New York, falling under the one-party consent statute which simply means that one party to the conversation must have knowledge and give consent to the recording.

After the Audio

Although Paviglianiti was prepared to be pushed out, she did not believe she would be let go until October 28, when she taped their conversation.

“My jaw hit the table,” Paviglianiti says, “I didn’t think he was going to put me in that position.”
After seeking counsel and confronting Doxey with her claim, Paviglianiti was hired back at the club, but this time as a cashier, making less than half of what she made at the bar. She is a certified New York State teacher, but she has been unable to find a teaching job. When she became pregnant, she needed income more than ever.

“I need to work,” Paviglianiti says, “I need a job. And some money is better than no money.” Paviglianiti says after her daughter is born next month, she hopes to find work at a day care or nursery school. But today, she continues to work the overnight cashier shifts.

Fired for Being Pregnant…Not a New Trend

Jennifer Paviglianiti is not the first woman to file a discrimination lawsuit after being fired for being pregnant. Just this year, Margaret Gibson of Atlanta was awarded $80,000 in a settlement after she claimed that U.S. Security Associates, Inc. fired her for being pregnant.

In 2007 Amanda Wilson, a waitress at a Hooters restaurant in California, was fired after announcing she was pregnant. She claimed Hooters management cut her work week from five days to one, trimmed her supervisory responsibilities, and finally ended her job completely.

Similarly, Christina Nuss sued the owners of the Scotch & Sirloin restaurant where she worked in Wichita, Kan., for discrimination after she was fired in 2007. Nuss became concerned about how women were being treated at work. The lawsuit claimed that “Scotch management had told this waitress that her pregnancy was unattractive and unappealing to the male clientele of the Scotch, and that it did not fit their image.”

What Now?

When reached on his cell phone about Jennifer Paviglianiti’s claim, John Doxey said he would have no comment.
His lawyer, Robert F. Millman, told the ABC News Law & Justice Unit, “we are not prepared to respond to anything.”
As for Paviglianiti, she says she wants Doxey to admit discrimination.

“I just want him to learn his lesson – he owns a business that is 90 percent women – somebody is going to get pregnant eventually. I shouldn’t have to choose between the job that pays the bills and my child. The car companies don’t care if I get laid off. If he gets away with it then a maybe anyone can get away with it.”

After the baby is born, Paviglianiti says she hopes to get her master’s degree in child care. Tuckner, her lawyer, says he is confident that before long, they will be able to prove their case.

“She stands for all women,” Tuckner says, “Why do we have a society that says you are less than because you are growing a baby inside you?”

From Blog Talk Radio:

Faten Abdallah interviews Jack Tuckner, leading civil rights trial attorney, and the co-founding partner of Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP, a NYC-based law firm dedicated to the empowerment of women in the workplace.

Q: How many “Conservatives” does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: How many do you want it to take and what’s it worth to you?

“Americans oppose the Democratic [health care] plan because they know the final product is a colossal legislative mistake.” Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell

The “colossal mistake” this wealthy lawyer and Kentucky senator (and the “proud father of three daughters—god forbid one is gay or gets knocked up) refers to, is spending money on poor people. No money for poor people. Let’s call a spade a spade. And that reminds me, no money for people of color either. And no money for women—especially if it’s needed for reproductive rights use—forget it—your body is our body, little lady. And kids? Please. And no money for queers either. No money for sick people, no money for veterans and no money for schools, roads, bridges and teachers. Why? Because these disempowered types can’t afford corporate lobbyists to influence (buy, grease, shtup) these empty-suited shills for America the Shopping Mall, so they have no use for individuals. In fact, they’re willing to let you die. McConnell and the other “conservatives” are willing to let some of us die because it will cost his sponsors money when our health becomes the primary focus, not the corporate profit margin. Many of these craven, useless lawmakers don’t really care if some of us live or die, so long as it doesn’t cost their principal corporatist constituents (the benefactors, sugar daddies and “johns”) one farthing more than they have to pay, which is typically nothing anyway.

Most fair-minded folks who actually care about the welfare of the American people understand that a single-payer universal health care system is the most equitable, fair and righteous method of health care administration, followed closely by the public option backup. Who or what is the good congressman protecting from the “colossal mistake” of the currently grossly diluted health care reform bill? Insurance companies and their proxies, obviously. The same despicable industry that gouges us for obscenely high monthly premiums to protect our families’ health, and then buck and kick like prize rodeo bulls when actual coverage is needed. They don’t want to pay up. They fight us, withhold from us, and then drop us. They’re in business not to honor our insurance policies. And the craziest part is, this doesn’t strike all of us as wildly insane and unacceptable. We all just trudge along like depressed lemmings after a heavy meal.

So what’s wrong with “conservative” fiscal responsibility? Perhaps nothing, if they weren’t simply lying through their teeth about their prudence. Fiscal restraint’s got nothing to do with the “conservative” ethos in this country. Conservatives spend plenty of money on our several desperate, failing and distractive “wars,” such as the war on crime,” for example, which really means only petty inner city street crime, not the big ticket crimes, the big corporate drug importation crime apparatus, for example, although it costs roughly $60,000 per inmate to keep the $7.2 million people (yes, that’s 7.2 million) in prisons and jails each year in the US (and we spend $210,000 per youth to confine 1600 kids each year in NY’s barbaric prison system, all “conservative” funded). The $14.4 trillion corporate bailout alone could’ve radically changed the world for the better (see what $14.4 trillion could’ve bought instead—link to Mother Jones article) had we not given it back to those that squandered and stole it in the first instance; and income tax policies that all but exempt the richest among us and our most lucrative corporations from paying any taxes at all in many cases, let alone their fair share. As the late Leona Helmsley, deranged convicted billionaire tax cheat, famously quipped, “only the little people pay taxes,” and our ruling class of corporatists wish to keep it just that way, while defunding services to benefit the working taxpayer and providing “tax breaks” to those who need it the least.

Do fiscal conservatives shirk from spending money to fund the “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost the US almost 1 trillion dollars? Putting aside the immense immorality of our imperialism, do any of the more thoughtful and honest among us really think we’re getting any benefit of this war bargain? Why are these actual death panels (unlike the phantom bogeymen of the same name the conservatives invented to scare us back into the warm fold of insurance company hegemony) acceptable for unregulated funding but not health care for all, school breakfasts and lunches and abundant resources for women’s health, for example? Well, the first reason is that their kids, of course, are not shipping off to die in distant places in the name of defeating “terrorism.” Secondly, the war funds enormous corporate profits and distracts the rest of us from the real “terrors” looming at home as our great nation completes its sad, limping transmutation into America, Inc., the Brand. The same Reaganomics that brought us the “supply side” lies of the 80’s, spawned in our greed-is-good culture of addictive consumerism, has been nurtured and repackaged as the vast Ponzi scheme that Wall Street and its aiders and abettors have perpetrated on us for decades now, and still, we go placidly amid the noise, haste and duplicity as the same leading players lead us down the same sleepy garden path to ruin. How’d we get this complacent and apathetic?

Our wealthiest citizens became fabulously rich doing what? What service, beneficial idea, or innovative product did they contribute to our nation or planet that resulted in such enormous profit backlash? Take your time and think. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. The answer? Nothing—they contributed nothing. In fact, they stole from all of us, pillaging and plundering with our robotic blessing, because it occurred under the presumptively watchful gaze of our regulatory agencies, such as they’ve become. They sold “exotic” bundles of intentionally complex sounding paper instruments to each other at contrived and impossibly inflated levels of fantasy profit, and then dumped the worthless post-hallucinatory debris into the polluted economic atmosphere, leaving most of us unable to breathe and paying through our clogged noses for the massive cleanup. Bernie Madoff was just an iconic symbol, the perfect avatar of our times. After decades of stealing everyone’s money in a scam that would’ve been caught if anyone were actually looking, he finally just turned himself in. Yet, America’s entire economic engine is just Madoff writ large. And the same foxes are still guarding the same hen house. What a scam.

Someone recently said that if you held NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg upside down and shook him, you could pay for NYC kids’ vanishing MetroCards just from the loose change that falls out of his pockets. And if the fabulously wealthy Mayor Bloomberg actually volunteered the couple of relative bucks it’d cost him to help these kids, I’d personally campaign for him for a fourth term and publicly sing his praises.

But philanthropy shouldn’t be compelled on Bloomberg alone, and to him and to Senator McConnell, and all my wealthy American brothers and sisters, who would no doubt accuse me of trying to redistribute their hard earned wealth to less fortunate Americans in an evil “socialist” plot, I say this: keep your money—may it grow exponentially again as it did before the deluge came (the deluge caused by your economists and bankers and regulators who were paid not to see the unfairness unfolding and the dangers lurking). May you leave tens of millions of dollars in tax free inheritances to your progeny, and may you expatriate your vast wealth to Zurich and the Caymans, where it should continue to multiply as the fruitful nontaxable income you helped legislate it to be—stay rich and go in peace. Keep your money—just don’t be such a lying sack of sand in the process. Nastiness, rigidity, hatefulness and stinginess are not “conservative” qualities. Surely you can be rich and powerful without being a schmuck. Remember, my powerful Capitalist friends, that Jesus, Himself, was a radical liberal. And both He and we would feel a lot better about you conservatives if you occasionally made some “colossal mistakes” in the service of others, even if the others can’t pay the full freight. Maybe it’ll cost a contributing corporation some business. But it just may be the right thing to do.