Supervisor publishing parts of my PhD with other people

I’ve been on mat leave for the past year because I’ve been pregnant with and had my second baby. My progress has been slow since having returned, so I acknowledge that they may have run out patience but I’m still not happy with this situation.

Basically, I’m doing a post-doc with my PhD supervisor. My supervisor has taken parts of my PhD while I was on mat leave and sent them to other post-docs in our lab for an upgrade. They collected slightly more data and reworked the analysis completely. They then put my name down the list of authors and sent it to a journal for publication. I told them I was upset that they did this but they maintained that it was the right approach. The journal returned the paper requesting some changes and I’ve been asked to help. Any help I’ve provided has been slow but also has been veto’d by the now first author.

I’m really upset that my PhD work turned into this. These are my PhD chapters. This is still ultimately my work. I don’t know what to do, especially now that I’ve been downgraded on the author’s list on my own work, and my consent didn’t play a role in any of this. I’m also very unhappy with the quality of this work. I have two options. The first is to let this go and move on and focus on publishing other chapters by myself and the second is to push back and reclaim this piece of work. Please remember that the latter will create friction between me and my supervisor/employer moving forward and will potentially damage my career.