Eight weeks before Danelle Buchman's baby was due, an artery ruptured in her uterus, which nearly killed her and her child. Delivered by emergency C-section in 2010, her newborn daughter, Avery, spent one month in intensive care. Buchman survived only after an immediate hysterectomy. When she tried to return to a PR job she loved and had won rave performance reviews for at a Maryland nonprofit a few weeks later, Buchman's employer first demoted her and cut her salary by a third. Then it fired her.
It was all perfectly legal.
Buchman, 37, who lives in Clarksville, Maryland, was not covered by the federal Family Medical Leave Act. And a new Labor Department survey shows that neither is 40 percent of the U.S. workforce.