A PREGNANT woman who works at a Shenzhen technology company said that she was asked to sit at the company’s front door nine hours a day without a desk as she refused to leave the company after being laid off, according to a report by Guangdong TV.

    The woman, surnamed Xu, is seven months pregnant and has worked at Skyroam Technology Co. Ltd. for several years, but she recently got laid off after the company dismissed the customer service department, in which she worked.

    As Xu hadn’t reached an agreement with the company regarding her severance pay, she refused to leave the company. However, what surprised her was that the company made her sit at the company’s front door from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. every workday, without giving her a desk or assigning her any work, according to Xu.

    “I feel hurt and bitterly disappointed by what they’ve done to me,” Xu said.

    “I saw her sitting there before and I thought she was a visitor. This company is so inhuman. How could people do such things to her?” said a female employee from a neighboring company.

    The director of the company’s human resources department, surnamed Gao, said that the company had dismissed the customer service department, but they failed to find a suitable position for Xu. As Xu insisted on staying with the company, they had no choice but to make her sit somewhere in the office.

    Gao said that they couldn’t drive Xu away, because she was pregnant. Gao said that Xu hadn’t been allowed to use the empty seats on the 10th floor, because those seats were reserved for employees who were on a business trip in the United States, and whose work involved business secrets, making them inappropriate for Xu to sit there.

    “Why can’t she sit at the front door? She can also sit with me in my office, but she refused to do so,” Gao said.

    A lawyer, named Pan Xiang, said that what the company was doing to Xu was a kind of corporal punishment. Some residents said that the company’s approach would discourage its employees from having babies, despite the country’s encouraging couples to have a second child.(Zhang Yang)