Pregnant, and Pushed Out of a Job

By DINA BAKST, Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times
January 30, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/pregnant-and-pushed-out-of-a-job.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

FEW people realize that getting pregnant can mean losing your
job. Imagine a woman who, seven months into her pregnancy, is
fired from her position as a cashier because she needed a few
extra bathroom breaks. Or imagine another pregnant employee
who was fired from her retail job after giving her
supervisors a doctor’s note requesting she be allowed to
refrain from heavy lifting and climbing ladders during the
month and a half before her maternity leave: that’s what
happened to Patricia Leahy. In 2008 a federal judge in
Brooklyn ruled that her firing was fair because her employers
were not obligated to accommodate her needs.

We see this kind of case in our legal clinic all the time. It
happens every day to pregnant women in the United States, and
it happens thanks to a gap between discrimination laws and
disability laws.

Federal and state laws ban discrimination against pregnant
women in the workplace. And amendments to the Americans With
Disabilities Act require employers to provide reasonable
accommodations to disabled employees (including most
employees with medical complications arising from
pregnancies) who need them to do their jobs. But because
pregnancy itself is not considered a disability, employers
are not obligated to accommodate most pregnant workers in any
way.

As a result, thousands of pregnant women are pushed out of
jobs that they are perfectly capable of performing - either
put on unpaid leave or simply fired - when they request an
accommodation to help maintain a healthy pregnancy. Many are
single mothers or a family’s primary breadwinner. They are
disproportionately low-income women, often in physically
demanding jobs with little flexibility.

Thankfully, State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat from
Manhattan, and Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther, a Democrat from
Sullivan County, have introduced legislation to fill this gap
in New York. Their bills - S. 6273 and A. 9114 - would
require employers to provide reasonable accommodations for
pregnant women whose health care providers say they need
them, unless doing so would be an undue hardship for the
employer.

These accommodations could include providing a seat for
employees who spend long periods standing, allowing more
frequent restroom breaks, limiting heavy lifting or
transferring an employee to a less strenuous or hazardous
position. As of 2010, seven states, including California, had
passed laws requiring private employers to provide at least
some accommodations. And they have been used countless times
to help pregnant women keep their jobs.

This kind of law is a public health necessity. Without its
protections, pregnant women are reluctant to ask for the
accommodations they need for their own health and for the
health of their unborn children. For many women, a choice
between working under unhealthy conditions and not working is
no choice at all. In addition, women who can work longer into
their pregnancies often qualify for longer periods of leave
following childbirth, which facilitates breastfeeding,
bonding with and caring for a new child and a smoother and
healthier recovery from childbirth.

Pregnancy-related accommodations also promote economic
security for families. Women who are forced early into unpaid
leave are set back with lost wages and, when they return to
work, with missed advancement opportunities. Women who are
let go don’t just lose out on critical income - they must
fight extra hard to re-enter a job market that is especially
brutal on the unemployed. Worse yet, they often confront a
bias against hiring mothers with small children.

Finally, employers might consider that providing
accommodations to pregnant workers would even be good for the
bottom line, in the form of reduced turnover, increased
loyalty and productivity and healthier workers. With minor
job modifications, a woman might be able to work up until the
delivery of her child and return to work fairly soon after
giving birth. If she were forced out instead, her employer
would waste time and money finding a replacement. In the
worst-case scenario, employers could be responsible for much
higher medical costs if their workers were afraid to ask for
accommodations and instead continued doing work that
endangered their pregnancies.

Three-quarters of women now entering the work force will
become pregnant on the job, yet gaps in our civil rights laws
leave this enormous class without the right to the modest
accommodations that would protect them. New York’s
Legislature should pass this law as soon as possible, and
other states should follow. No pregnant woman in this country
should have to choose between her job and a healthy
pregnancy.

[Dina Bakst, a lawyer, is a founder and president of A Better
Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center.]

___________________________________________

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