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By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh
Photography museum Fotografiska will settle a lawsuit in which managers are accused of discriminating against a pregnant employee.
As reported by the NY Post, the Swedish museum’s location in Gramercy Park, was slapped with a lawsuit by a pregnant employee, for allegedly scolding her for sitting during her shift and bringing up her decision not to get an abortion. The museum, located at 281 Park Avenue South, is reportedly shuttering its location on September 29. Museum officials previously said the principal reason for the closure is space constraints.
The former employee, a Sheepshead Bay woman, claimed in the lawsuit that the museum violated New York City human rights law and state labor law with the way the treated her. She says she was hired in April 2022 to provide customer service, ticket sales and tours at the museum. She says that she had notified her managers about her pregnancy status and intentions to get an abortion about a month into her new job, per court documents.
The next month, however, she told her managers she had changed her mind and decided to continue with the pregnancy. The Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit from March alleges that in May 2022, after a break during a shift the employee was approached by a manager who “aggressively reprimanded” her for sitting during work hours, despite her already having asked for permission to sit that day as she wasn’t feeling well from her pregnancy.
The manager said the staffer was “asking too much” and taking advantage of her managers’ kindness by asking to be sitting as other employees would follow her lead, per the lawsuit. The same manager then made “derogatory comments” about the worker and told her “everyone is talking about you because of what you are doing,” the lawsuit reads. “Just because you had an abortion, it doesn’t mean you can ask for special treatment,” the manager said, according to court papers. “The recovery from an abortion doesn’t take this long, and it’s been a week, and you are still demanding special treatment.”
Per the Post, the day after the incident the worker emailed another manager to schedule a meeting about her treatment, and though the meeting was scheduled for the same day, it “did not occur.” “The aforementioned situation caused [the worker] to be deeply distressed, leading [the worker] to undergo a mental breakdown in the bathroom” of Fotografiska, the lawsuit continues. The employee resigned within the week, according to court records.
Since then, on June 12 the judge overseeing the case received a letter announcing that the parties reached a settlement in the case for an undisclosed amount of money, adding that paperwork to “fully consummate the settlement” is in progress.
Fotografiska’s attorney did not immediately respond to the Post’s request for comment. The former employee’s attorney declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement.
The Park Avenue art museum opened in December 2019 at the former church mission house in Gramercy, a six-story, 45,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival historical landmark building.
