The violence had escalated for years before one day in October 2020, when Virginia’s husband threatened her life in front of her two children. She fled. The three of them hid in a domestic violence shelter in New York City as a global pandemic raged.

Virginia, whose full name is being withheld to protect her safety, wondered how she would care for her children. She was their sole caregiver, and most child care options had shuttered in the pandemic. Her shift at work as an ultrasound tech ran until 10 p.m. every weeknight, an hour past the shelter’s curfew.

The only thing that made sense was asking for an earlier shift. The day after fleeing her husband, Virginia arrived to work at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, where she’d been a tech for more than six years, with her 4- and 5-year-old and a letter from the shelter explaining to the head of the radiology department that she’d need a new schedule. Under New York City law, employers are required to accommodate workplace requests from domestic violence survivors unless it would create an “undue hardship” for the business. They’re also required to engage in a discussion with the worker to try to accommodate their needs.

Instead, Virginia said she was told to take time off to handle her situation. When she returned a week later, she was told that no one in the ultrasound department had been consulted about her request, and she was asked to take two more weeks of leave because the department remained “concerned for her well-being.” They would have to be unpaid weeks, however, because she’d used all her paid time off.

“That’s when I start realizing they are not doing anything,” Virginia told The 19th.

By the end of October, she was told the department could not accommodate her shift change or her extended leave — the one she said she’d been told to go on. And after she didn’t show up to work on her original return date because she fell ill with COVID-19, she got an email from the HR department: She had been fired for what they claimed was “job abandonment.” The termination letter made no mention of her request for accommodations three weeks earlier, or the fact that she’d communicated that she had COVID and couldn’t return per the hospital’s own guidelines.

Read the full article about labor protections for domestic violence survivors by Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th.