[hansvm]

- Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate.

- Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well.

- Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.

[sokoloff]

Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?

[hansvm]

Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.