Liz Watson, Senior Counsel

Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Liz Watson is Senior Counsel to the Education and Employment Team at the National Women’s Law Center. In her work on the Education and Employment Team, Liz uses legislative advocacy, public education and litigation to promote full and fair opportunities for women and girls in employment and job training. She also works on cross-cutting projects at the Center that advance the interests of women and girls. Before coming to the Center, Liz was Executive Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy where she led public policy initiatives focused on improving policies and programs that address the needs of low-income workers and marginalized girls and young women. Prior to that, she was legislative counsel for Workplace Flexibility 2010 at Georgetown Law, where much of her work focused on developing policy solutions to work-family conflict and its consequences for low-wage workers. She also practiced employment law at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Liz began her career as a Skadden Public Interest Law Fellow, working with low-wage workers and women receiving public benefits in New York City. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Susan Y. Illston of the Northern District of California. Liz is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Carleton College.

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My Take

Legal Setback Not the End of the Line for Pregnant Workers Seeking Fairness on the Job

Posted by
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: January 15, 2013 at 12:05 pm

Peggy Young was a UPS truck driver. When employees at her jobsite needed changes to their job duties because they had a disability, or an on-the-job injury, or even a D.U.I. conviction that prevented them from driving legally, UPS provided it. However, when she asked for light duty in order to avoid heavy lifting for a few months because she was pregnant, her employer refused and forced her onto unpaid leave for the duration of her pregnancy. Unfortunately, last week the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held in United Parcel Service, Inc. v. Young, that in doing so, UPS did not violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), despite the PDA’s requirement that employers treat pregnant employees the same as other employees who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.” The court held that taking this language literally would “transform an antidiscrimination statute into a requirement to provide accommodation to pregnant employees” and concluded that Congress did not intend this result. It came to this conclusion even though in passing the PDA, Congress stated, “[W]hen pregnant women are not able to work for medical reasons, they must be accorded the same rights, leave privileges and other benefits, as other workers who are disabled from working.”

The Fourth Circuit’s decision is extremely troubling, but to quote an aptly-titled article on the decision, Pregnancy Bias Fight Not Over, Despite 4th Circ. Ruling. The article notes that because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was expanded in 2008 to require employers to provide accommodations to workers with temporary disabilities, employers may be “guilty of discrimination for not providing pregnant workers the same accommodations” when they have similar temporary restrictions on their ability to work.

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Tags: Courts & the Judiciary, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Women at Work, Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | 3 comments

Keeping the Courthouse Doors Open for Low-Wage Women Workers

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Counsel | Posted on: December 03, 2012 at 02:44 pm

Today the Supreme Court is hearing argument in Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk. In this case, the plaintiff, Laura Symczyk, alleges that her nursing home employer violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by deducting a 30-minute lunch break from her wages and the wages of her coworkers, regardless of whether they worked during their scheduled breaks.

The question before the Court is whether an employer’s offer of settlement to the named plaintiff in a class action alleging company-wide violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) can end the case, when the employer makes the settlement offer before any of the named plaintiff’s coworkers have a meaningful opportunity to join the case. If the Court’s answer to this question is yes, then employers will have the power to shut down class actions challenging wage and hour violations before they begin, leaving other affected employees without the chance to have their claims heard.

Such a holding would undermine the intent of the FLSA which was to protect vulnerable workers from exploitation and abuse. When Congress passed this landmark legislation in 1938 it provided for “collective actions” through which groups of workers could band together to enforce their rights.

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Tags: Employment, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Issues Before the Courts, Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Employment, Judges & the Courts | Add new comment

Guess Who? Game Sparks Gender Equality Debate

Posted by
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
Valarie Hogan, Fellow
| Posted on: November 27, 2012 at 02:38 pm
Guess Who?
Photo Credit: Hasbro

With Black Friday gone and Cyber Monday continuing to fuel sales, the holiday season is in full swing. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, or Festivus, department stores and online retailers are fighting hard to sell you things you don’t need. Unfortunately, while companies are careful to avoid insensitivity to cultural or religious differences at this time of year, they are less concerned about whether their games and marketing treat girls and boys fairly.

Last week, a 6-year-old girl took Hasbro to task for its dismal representation of women in its “Guess Who?” game. With her mother’s help, the girl wrote a letter to Hasbro (the self-proclaimed “Greatest Name in Games…Anytime, Anywhere, For Everyone!”) complaining about the inequity and asking for it to be fixed:

Dear Hasbro,

My name is R______. I am six years old. I think it's not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won't give little girls much care.

Also if girls want to be a girl in Guess Who they'll always lose against a boy, and it will be harder for them to win. I am cross about that and if you don't fix it soon, my mum could throw Guess Who out.

Hasbro side-stepped the criticism, responding that the game is based on numerical equation and there are five characteristics for each character to aid in the process of elimination. In response to Hasbro, the little girl’s mum asked why female gender is considered a characteristic, but male gender is not.

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Tags: Gender Equality, A Women's Agenda | 2 comments

Worse Treatment for Pregnant Workers: It’s Ironic, Don’t You Think?

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Counsel | Posted on: November 26, 2012 at 06:11 pm

Arjun Sethi and NWLC’s recent article on CNN.com describes pregnant workers’ struggles to hold onto their jobs and have healthy pregnancies, after their requests for minor adjustments to their job duties – adjustments they needed to continue safely working during pregnancy – were denied by their employers. These workers had the audacity to ask for permission to: carry a water bottle, have a stool to sit down, avoid lifting heavy objects, and take bathroom breaks.

For those of us who are lucky enough to work in places that routinely accommodate such requests, or where we don’t have to ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, it can be hard to imagine what it’s like to be pregnant and get fired for following doctor’s orders to stay hydrated, off our feet or follow a lifting restriction.

But that’s exactly what’s happening to some pregnant workers in physically demanding and nontraditional jobs. All too often, employers are quite willing to provide an accommodation to a worker who is injured on the job or has a disability, but insist on denying an accommodation to a pregnant worker.

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Tags: Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Women at Work, Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | Add new comment

Back to the Future for Pregnant Workers

Posted by
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: October 04, 2012 at 03:20 pm

As the Huffington Post highlighted last week, the EEOC has filed a recent spate of pregnancy discrimination lawsuits. One case is against an employer that had a written policy requiring termination of pregnant employees in their third month of pregnancy. In another, an employer required pregnant workers to submit a note from their doctors in order to continue working during pregnancy. These rules seem like a throwback to when pregnant women were expected to quit work as soon as they began to “show.” But this kind of discrimination is still happening today, almost 35 years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Too many employers still seem to be relying on an outdated personnel manual. In fact, the past 10 years have seen a significant uptick in claims of pregnancy discrimination. Some employers continue to blatantly discriminate by firing pregnant workers, especially those in physically demanding jobs. Others are a bit more subtle in forcing pregnant women out of the workplace: they refuse to make minor adjustments to job duties for those workers who need such accommodations to continue safely working.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, recently introduced in Congress, would make a big difference. The bill would strengthen the protections in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act by requiring employers to make the same sort of reasonable accommodations for pregnancy that they are already required to make for disabilities.

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Tags: EEOC, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | 3 comments