Pregnancy Discrimination Act

Today is a day for pregnant workers to celebrate. Five years ago today, the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) became law and restored the promise of the ADA, making the workplace much more accessible for people with disabilities.

But wait, you might be saying, pregnancy is not a disability, so how does this protect pregnant women? Here is why we are celebrating the ADAAA:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodation, communication, and government activities and requires reasonable accommodations in the workplace. The ADAAA, signed into law on September 25, 2008, expanded the universe of disabilities that employers are required to reasonably accommodate—meaning, an employer must make an adjustment in the employee’s daily work that helps a person do his or her job. Read more »

Thirty-five years ago the Pregnancy Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination against pregnant workers. But still today, pregnant women across the country are being fired from their jobs, forced onto unpaid leave, or made to quit when they need temporary accommodations like staying off high ladders or refraining from heavy lifting. Many women can work throughout their pregnancies without any changes to their jobs. But for some pregnant workers – particularly those in low-wage and physically demanding jobs – slight job modifications can be crucial to their ability to continue safely working during pregnancy. Despite the fact that comparable accommodations are routinely offered when employees need them because of disabilities, employers often refuse to make even simple accommodations for pregnant women. As a result, many pregnant women are prevented from continuing to work even when they are willing and able to do so. Other women stay on the job despite a lack of accommodation because they can’t afford not to, potentially jeopardizing their health and the health of their pregnancies.

Today, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), in tandem with A Better Balance (ABB), is releasing It Shouldn't Be A Heavy Lift: Fair Treatment for Pregnant Workers, which tells the stories of eight women who were refused the same sorts of accommodations during their pregnancy that their employers provided to other workers. As the report describes, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) requires employers to treat pregnant workers the same as those “similar in their ability or inability to work.” So if employers make reasonable accommodations for workers with disabilities, as they must under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the PDA requires employers to provide accommodations to pregnant workers with similar limitations, too. But all too often, employers and the courts misunderstand and misinterpret these requirements.

Take the case of Peggy Young, whom the Center has written about before. Young worked as an air driver for UPS. When she became pregnant, UPS told her she had to bring a doctor’s note with her restrictions. Her doctor recommended she lift no more than 20 pounds. UPS told Young that UPS has a policy of no light duty for pregnancy – even though the company provided it to employees injured on the job, those protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and to others with conditions ranging from high blood pressure to sleep apnea that prevented coworkers from maintaining a commercial driver’s license. Read more »

Amanda Roller was a call center employee in Kansas. After Amanda became pregnant she started experiencing morning sickness. Amanda’s supervisor repeatedly refused her requests to go the bathroom and instead told her that she would get Amanda a larger trash can so that she could vomit at her desk. Amanda asked again, and her supervisor again denied her request, saying, “We don’t pay you to pee.” Amanda was then demoted and eventually fired.

Unfortunately, Amanda is not alone. Across the country, pregnant women face discrimination in the workplace when their employers refuse to make adjustments to their job duties such as honoring lifting restrictions, allowing them to stay off high ladders, or even just letting them go to the bathroom to vomit.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) outlawed this type of discrimination in 1978 with its requirement that employers treat pregnant workers the same as those who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.” But too many lower courts have misinterpreted the PDA, holding incorrectly that it permits employers to provide accommodations to workers with disabilities or on-the-job injuries but deny those accommodations to pregnant workers. Read more »

My senior year of college, two of my roommates and I watched Teen Mom CONSTANTLY. I liked to pretend I wasn’t watching it, but the conversation usually went something like this:

Becka (standing in doorway): “Oh jeez, guys. You’re watching this?”

Arielle: “Yes. Absolutely.”

[10 minutes later]

Rachel: “…Do you want to sit down?”

Becka (still standing in doorway): “…..Yes. FARRAH’S CRYING FACE IS CRAZY.”

When you watch the show, the difficulties of teen parents and pregnant students become painfully clear. Recently, I was re-watching Season 1 on Netflix Instant, and it clicked – wow. The Pregnant and Parenting Student Access to Education Act would REALLY help these girls.

Title IX already affords a number of protections to pregnant & parenting students. This law requires that schools receiving federal funds not discriminate against students on the basis of sex, which includes pregnancy and related conditions like childbirth, pregnancy termination, and recovery. This prohibition against discrimination comes in a number of forms – for example, students must not be forced to attend a different program or school than their peers, must be given the opportunity to make up missed work for pregnancy-related absences, must be treated the same as if they had a temporary disability, and may not be excluded from sports or extracurricular activities.

The Pregnant and Parenting Student Access to Education Act (PPSAE) is designed to go beyond nondiscrimination by giving students the tools they need to succeed. It would enable school districts to – among other things – create graduation plans for pregnant and parenting students; provide academic support, parenting and life skills classes, strategies to prevent future unplanned pregnancies, and legal aid services; help pregnant and parenting students gain access to affordable child care, and revise school policies and practices to remove discouraging barriers. Pretty great, huh? Read more »

The law is very clear: you can’t fire a woman simply because she’s pregnant.  You can’t force her onto unpaid “medical” leave when she’s capable of doing her job. You can’t discriminate against her, period, even if your customers would prefer not seeing pregnant women in the workplace.  You have to treat her as well as you treat other workers who are similar in their ability or inability to work. 

Yet despite these basic black-letter rules—enshrined thirty-five years ago in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA)—employers often violate them, especially when it comes to pregnant women in low-wage jobs—women who have the fewest resources to fall back on if they lose their paychecks and the most difficulty finding help to enforce the laws that protect them. Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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 »

Heather got fired from Wal-Mart for carrying a water bottle.

Natasha was forced onto unpaid leave and then fired because her district manager at Rent-A-Center found out she needed help with occasional heavy lifting on the sales floor.

Sarah* lost her job at a fast food restaurant for taking bathroom and water breaks.

What do all of these women have in common? They were all pregnant.

All they needed were minor adjustments to continue safely working during pregnancy.  They didn’t get these adjustments.  And they all lost their jobs because of it.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would put an end to this absurdity. Senators Bob Casey and Jeanne Shaheen will introduce the bill in the U.S. Senate today. Representative Jerrold Nadler introduced the PWFA in the U.S. House of Representatives in May, and it now has more than 100 co-sponsors. Public health organizations, business organizations, women’s organizations, worker organizations, and religious groups have lined up in support as well.

The PWFA would make it illegal to fire a pregnant employee who requests a reasonable accommodation – such as a water break, bathroom break, or modification of a lifting requirement. Pregnant workers would have the same rights to temporary accommodations on the job that are available to workers with disabilities.

Why do we need this bill? Stories like the ones above sound like they are from the Dark Ages, right? Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 made it illegal to discriminate against pregnant workers, women were expected to quit their jobs when they became pregnant. Back then, pregnancy was widely regarded as a disabling condition. Read more »

On Monday, the news broke that a pregnant woman is now leading a Fortune 500 company—an important and exciting milestone. Before being appointed CEO of Yahoo this week, Marissa Mayer disclosed her pregnancy to Yahoo’s Board. When she announced her pregnancy publicly on Monday, she praised the Board for its “evolved thinking” in hiring her anyway – that is, for not violating the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

I’m not so sure following the law is all that praiseworthy, but here’s what made me cringe as I read the otherwise great news of a pregnant woman breaking through the glass ceiling:

Mayer told Forbes, “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it.”

I’m picturing a phalanx of 24/7 baby nurses, a state-of-the-art high-tech home office located in a spacious and sunny corner of a beautiful nursery, an in-house lactation consultant, a personal chef, and, don’t forget the personal trainer! As the CEO, Mayer will be free to telecommute to her heart’s content, which is not at all the situation for most working women. Read more »