Below is the case reading:

Conflict at MRW: The New Employee's Pregnancy.

Conflict at MRW: The New Employee's Pregnancy Margarita Mart and Adolfo Montalvo, ESADE Business School-Barcelona, Spain S ilvia Vilchez, human resources director of the Spanish courier firm MRW, had a surprise in store for her at her weekly meeting with Mara Jos Garrido, MRW's head of recruitment, in mid-August 2010. Mara Jos informed Silvia that Sonia Reguant, newly hired systems administrator, had just announced she was two or three weeks pregnant, and that her pregnancy was a risky one that would force her to rest at home. Sonia had joined the company some weeks earlier, at the beginning of July, to tackle serious problems with the firm's computing systems. Her post was critically important to MRW's strategy. Mara Jos told Silvia that Sonia's six-month hiring probationary period in the systems department had not yet passed. Throughout MRW's history, medical leaves related to maternity had always complied faithfully with Spanish law. However, this was the first time that a worker announced her pregnancy at the beginning of her probationary period and (worse) in the middle of a belt-tightening situation for the company. Both the context and the company's needs were urgent: "What are we going to do about this?" asked Silvia. MRW'S SLOGAN: "YOU SET US INTO MOTION" The MRW courier company (www.mrw.es) was a household name in Spain, and its delivery vans and trucks plied the streets of villages and towns throughout the country. The company was well-known for its corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach and its track record. MRW's turnover (sales revenue) in 2010 came to 563 million. Based in Hospitalet (Barcelona), the firm had become Spain's largest courier company, with a 21 percent market share. It had 1,350 franchisees in Andorra, Spain (which accounted for 77 percent of the group's turnover), Gibraltar, Portugal (2 percent of group turnover), and Venezuela (20 percent of group turnover) (see Exhibit 1). The firm had 60 computer operating systems and over 14,000 staff, 4,700 vehicles, and four planes. MRW managed over 22 million dispatches a year.