Former AstraZeneca Sales Rep Files Lawsuit Charging Drugmaker With Pregnancy Discrimination
Managers at the international drug company allegedly fired the seven-year veteran a month after learning she was pregnant, for reasons the plaintiff claims were pretextual.
May 28, 2019 at 02:38 PM
3 minute read
Pregnancy test
International drug manufacturer AstraZeneca has been hit with a lawsuit alleging that a former sales representative in New York City was the victim of pregnancy discrimination when she was fired from her position in early 2018.
Mary Baselice claimed her more than seven-year record as a sales rep covering the Upper East Side of Manhattan was unblemished heading into 2018. According to the complaint she filed, she never received a performance rating below “effective” at any point, nor did she receive any disciplinary warnings or actions during her tenure with the company.
Baselice claimed the only thing that changed between her last review and her termination in February 2018 was the fact she informed her manager she was pregnant in January.
According to the complaint, Baselice's manager requested she attend a meeting less than a month after she alerted the company to her pregnancy. At the meeting, to her surprise, was her manager's manager and a member of the human resource team on speakerphone.
She was quizzed about elements of her business activity logs. Despite being “sandbagged with a last-minute meeting,” Baselice said in her complaint that she answered questions about delays to entries in her journal and why she didn't immediately answer phone calls from her direct manager on two occasions.
Despite providing what she considered reasonable and rational answers, she was notified within minutes of the meeting that she was terminated, effective immediately, due to “misconduct associated with the job.”
“Given Baselice's uniformly positive performance reviews, any such concerns were clearly a pretext manufactured for the purpose of justifying [AstraZeneca]'s intended and illegal pregnancy discrimination against Baselice,” the complaint states.
The complaint said the reasoning she was given at the time of her termination shifted in official documents, which said she was terminated based “solely on her consistent and repeated failure to follow company policy.”
At no point in her seven years of work with the company had she received any notice or warning about failing to adhere to company policies. In fact, only the opposite occurred, including the exclusively positive comments in her final review from Jan. 22, 2018.
“Consistent with a practice that is all too prevalent at large US companies, Baselice, an effective employee who received glowing performance reviews, was terminated from her job at [AstraZeneca] for the simple reason that she was pregnant,” the complaint states.
Baselice's lawsuit against the U.K.-based drug manufacturer asserted her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, as well as New York state and New York City human rights laws.
Allen & Desnoyers partner Denise D'Ambrosio represents Baselice in the suit. She did not respond to a request for comment.
A request for comment sent to representatives at AstraZeneca was not returned.
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