EEOC

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Too many employers still seem to be relying on an outdated personnel manual.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. Read more »

 Are we living in 2012 or 1950? I pondered that thought a lot while reading some of the stories in this week’s roundup. Today we have some stories on a pregnancy-based firing in Texas, a Wisconsin legislator’s explanation of the wage gap, and more.

First up, in ridiculous news: a teacher in the Dallas, TX was fired for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Welcome back to 1950!

Cathy Samford – a science teacher and the volleyball coach at Heritage Christian Academy – was fired last fall after disclosing her pregnancy to the Christian school she worked for. She and her fiancé, her baby’s father, had been planning on getting married later this year.

School headmaster Dr. Ron Taylor defends firing Samford, explaining the Heritage Christian Academy “expects their teachers to be ministers as well as educators,” and went on to add that “It's not that she's pregnant. The issue here is being an unmarried mother.” Read more »

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) requires that employers treat pregnant employees at least as well as they treat employees “similar in their ability or inability to work”—so Peggy Young, a part-time UPS driver who needed to avoid lifting more than twenty pounds during part of her pregnancy, might have thought that her employer was bound by law to make that accommodation, given that UPS had a policy of giving light duty to various other employees who were physically unable to do their usual job. Under UPS’s policy, employee who had been injured on the job were entitled to light duty, as were employees with a qualifying disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and employees who were injured off the job and failed a Department of Transportation medical exam. But UPS disagreed and forced her to take unpaid leave for the duration of her pregnancy. As a result, she also lost her medical coverage, months prior to the birth of her child. Then, she lost her pregnancy discrimination case, when the district court ruled that UPS could adopt “pregnancy blind” rules that allowed some employees similar to Peggy Young in their ability to work to go on light duty, while blocking Peggy Young from receiving the same accommodation.

The National Women’s Law Center joined the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and others today in a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to take the language of the PDA seriously and reverse the district court. Congress adopted the PDA in 1978, forcefully rejecting Supreme Court decisions that concluded that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy did not constitute unlawful sex discrimination, but rather discrimination between “pregnant and nonpregnant persons.” The PDA states that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions constitutes sex discrimination and further provides that pregnancy cannot be treated worse than other disabilities that similarly affect an employee’s ability to do the job. In passing the PDA, one of Congress’s targets was employee benefit programs that provided insurance coverage, for example, to cover a host of disabling conditions, but not pregnancy. Read more »

This week, the EEOC held a public meeting on unlawful discrimination against pregnant workers and workers with caregiving responsibilities at which experts, including the National Women’s Law Center’s own Vice President and General Counsel Emily Martin, presented compelling testimony setting out the widespread and often blatant ways in which employers continue to unlawfully discriminate in the workplace. Members of the Commission expressed dismay, if not complete surprise, that nearly 35 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was passed in 1978, discrimination on the basis of pregnancy persists, in the words of EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien, “unnecessarily depriving women of the means to support their families.”

The PDA amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to clarify that—duh!—employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is a type of sex discrimination. (Sounds obvious, right? Well, it wasn’t to the Supreme Court.) The PDA requires employers to treat women “affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” the same “as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.” This phrase is important—the PDA defines the sole relevant point of comparison between pregnant and non-pregnant workers as the person’s ability to do the job. So what does this mean?

First, consider that pregnancy discrimination claims appear to come up—at least based on the caselaw—most frequently in jobs that require a lot of physical activity like running, lifting, moving, standing, or repetitive motion. Many of the pregnancy discrimination cases arise in jobs traditionally held by men, such as law enforcement and trucking (so, ironically, pregnancy discrimination compounds the existing barriers that women face when attempting to break into many high-paying male-dominated positions), while others appear in female-dominated, often low-wage work like nursing assistance, cleaning, and retail. Read more »

A few weeks ago we shared the very exciting news that the Obama administration had held strong and we’d secured no-cost birth control for millions of women through the Affordable Care Act. This was a huge and important step for women’s health and something the National Women’s Law Center has been working towards for over a decade.

But, unfortunately, this decision and final rule has not quieted the opposition. Instead, those opposing the rule are continuing to push back and decry this significant advancement. We’ve posted a number of responses to the negative press and quotes, and we’re continuing to fight back by working with our state partners and submitting letters to the editor to newspapers across the country. Read more »

Way to show your appreciation, Hyatt:

After two housekeepers protested their faces being superimposed on bikini-clad cartoons during “Housekeeper Appreciation Week,” Hyatt Hotels ‘investigated’ and later fired the two sisters, Martha and Lorena Reyes, who had worked at the hotel for 7 and 24 years, respectively. The women have gone on to file harassment and retaliation charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Read more »

Does your employer-sponsored health insurance cover your birth control? Most of us couldn’t have said “yes” ten years ago.  Read more »