Even if breastfeeding is problem-free, just weeks after giving birth women find themselves back at work because they lack meaningful maternity leave: one in four mothers in the United States returns to work within two weeks of childbirth. Compare that to Sweden’s sixteen months of paid parental leave or Finland’s nine months of paid leave and provision for the mother or father to take—or split—additional paid “child care leave” until the child’s third birthday. This is not just the work of socially progressive Nordic countries. With the exception of a few small countries, like Papua New Guinea or Suriname, every other nation, rich or poor, now offers some form of paid maternity leave.
Instead, the United States has the twenty-year-old federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), an unpaid leave that doesn’t apply to 40 percent of the workforce because the law only requires companies with fifty or more employees to comply. To get the unpaid benefit, employees must have worked for the company for at least a year and logged 1,250 hours within the previous twelve months. And, quite frankly, a lot of families simply can’t afford to take unpaid leave.
In 2013 two mothers in Congress, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (a Democrat from New York) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (a Democrat from Connecticut), introduced the FAMILY Act (Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act), which would create a paid family leave fund at the federal level. The bill would provide workers up to twelve weeks of paid leave for their own serious illness; to care for a child, parent, or spouse with a serious illness; or to bond with a new child. Workers and employers would each contribute a very small portion of their wages into this insurance program; the self-sustaining fund would mean workers could receive up to 66 percent of their wages while on leave. “Family leave insurance” would be a more accurate description than “paid family leave,” because employees would be paying much of the cost themselves.
California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have already set up state-run, employee-funded disability- and family-care programs. In New Jersey, new mothers are entitled to reduced wages for six weeks. Rhode Island’s law offers most workers with up to four weeks off with about two-thirds of their salaries (up to $752 a week), and it protects employees from being fired and losing their health insurance while they’re out. And, though the maximum single leave is four weeks, each parent can take four weeks off to bond with a new baby. A mother recovering from birth could combine that with an additional six weeks paid through an existing state program, bringing her total paid time off to ten weeks. An entire family with a new baby could have fourteen weeks off, paid. Though not as robust as Sweden, these state programs are a start down the right road.
Until Congress moves on the FAMILY Act, women are left returning to work too soon after childbirth. In 2012 nearly one quarter of women who gave birth took off less than ten days, according to one study. In other cultures, the weeks after childbirth are a time when the mother needs to be taken care of and allowed to heal. This is also a precious time for bonding and caring for a new child and establishing a breastfeeding routine. But having time off after childbirth also saves lives. “We know maternity leave is associated with lower infant mortality rates,” explains Jody Heymann, dean of the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Children’s Chances: How Countries Can Move from Surviving to Thriving. As well as receiving more one-on-one care, infants whose mothers have paid maternity leave are more likely to be breastfed, which lowers illness and hospitalization rates for them and benefits women’s health. Beyond the marked health advantages, paid maternity leave creates economic gains in terms of reduced health care costs, reduced recruitment and retraining, and improved long-term earnings for women. It just makes sense.
A mother should not have to choose between her next paycheck and her baby’s health and vitality. More striking research shows that paid leave is directly correlated to infant death. By charting the correlation between death rates and paid leave in sixteen European countries, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia found that a fifty-week extension in paid leave was associated with a 20 percent drop in infant deaths. The biggest drop was in the deaths of babies between one month and one year old—the prime period for breastfeeding—though the mortality of children between one and five years also decreased as paid leave went up.
Mothers benefit too. Longer maternity leaves, whether paid or unpaid, are associated with a decline in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an overall improvement in maternal health, according to a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research. One national study of 1,762 mothers found that a one-week increase in maternity leave was associated with a 5 to 6 percent reduction in depressive symptoms from six to twenty-four months after birth. Another found that women who took less than eight weeks of paid leave experienced more depression and were in worse health overall than those who had longer leaves. The stress of leaving your baby so soon or trying to pump at work reduces many women to an emotional wreck.
Without any government-mandated policy, women find themselves at the mercy of their employer or hoping to win the good boss lottery. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of U.S. workers have access to any form of paid family leave, which includes parental leave and other time off to care for a family member. The private sector has stepped in to fill in some of the gaps, recognizing that accommodating family dynamics improves retention and employee satisfaction. Companies like McDonald’s, Chipotle, and Change.org have extended their paid maternity leave. In 2007 Google boosted its paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks. Facebook’s policy includes four months of paid leave for new moms and new dads, plus a $4,000 payment for each new child, including adopted children. In 2015 Microsoft announced that mothers can take a total of twenty weeks of fully paid leave and fathers can take twelve weeks of paid leave. Netflix, a pioneer in paid leave policies, announced that new parents, both moms and dads, including adoptive parents, can take as much paid leave as they like for up to a year after the birth or adoption of a child. The Los Gatos–based streaming giant became the first company in the United States to formally institute such a generous paid leave policy.
The burden of paying for parental leave shouldn’t be shouldered solely by companies, even rich and generous ones like Netflix and Microsoft. Netflix excluded, the policies at some of the most generous American companies pale in comparison with the thirty-one countries that provide a year or more of paid maternity leave, typically through government-run insurance programs.
And while things are improving for women who work in office environments, many of these policies don’t trickle down to hourly employees such as factory and retail workers. Nearly 90 percent of workers in private companies are left with no paid parental leave. The lack of a federal policy in the United States widens the socioeconomic disparity that affects which infants are breastfed and for how long. The highest-paid workers are most likely to have paid family leave, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, with more than one in five of the top 10 percent of earners getting paid family leave, compared to one in twenty in the bottom quartile. Unionized workers are also more likely to get benefits than nonunionized workers.
With no set standard for all, women find themselves cobbling together maternity leave by using vacation and sick days or opting into an employer’s disability insurance policy, which may pay a percentage of their salary for some of those twelve unpaid weeks. Teachers and college professors aim for summer break. These days, the concept of family planning does not refer to birth control but to figuring out how to maximize time with a newborn while staying financially solvent, employed, and sane. That is, until the unplannable happens.
Leigh Benrahou was one of those women. Benrahou and her husband carefully and methodically planned the timing of their second child to meet the twelve-month employment eligibility for FMLA at her new job as a registrar at a small college. They constantl
y reviewed their budget; factored in that Benrahou’s mother, who works at an elementary school, would be off during the summer to babysit; and bought into Benrahou’s company’s disability plan so she could receive a percentage of pay during the twelve unpaid weeks of FMLA. But their carefully laid plans started to go awry in her twentieth week, when she was diagnosed with placenta previa, which can result in early delivery. Benrahou shared her story in a 2015 issue of In These Times, the nonprofit online magazine. Despite some bleeding and cramping, and several brief hospital stays that used up her sick days, Benrahou stuck to her plan, working as much as possible after her diagnosis in order to save her precious vacation time, the article continued. But, in late December, her water broke. Though her due date was April 1, Leigh Benrahou gave birth by C-section on Christmas Eve—too soon to qualify for FMLA leave or any payoff from her disability insurance.
Her son, Ramzi, was born at twenty-six weeks and just over two pounds. Knowing that 20 percent of babies born at his gestational age don’t survive, Leigh spent the first hours after the delivery singularly focused on her tiny son’s survival. He needed oxygen, since his lungs weren’t fully developed. And, after he was whisked away for medical attention, Benrahou had to attend to another crisis: her carefully constructed paid maternity leave had disintegrated. So, freshly stitched up and still groggy from anesthesia, she spread out her medical fact sheets, insurance policy papers, and lists of phone numbers on her hospital bed and began to grapple with her new reality. Though her college was on winter break, which put off her return by about a week, Benrahou, who has a master’s in nonprofit management, realized she’d have to go back to work when classes resumed on January 6, less than two weeks after giving birth.
When women do return to work, many find themselves in a work environment that is unwelcoming or downright hostile to breastfeeding, with few legal protections to rely on. The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act give pregnant women and mothers the rights to accommodations of pregnancy and breastfeeding they lacked in the past. However, interpretations vary and discrimination toward pregnant women and mothers remains a systemic problem.
Sashay Allen-Brown, a police officer with the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) since 2006, returned to work twelve weeks after the birth of her son in 2011 and had decided to continue breastfeeding her child for one year. As a patrol officer she was required to wear a bulletproof vest but declined because, according to her complaint, “it was incompatible with lactation, caused pain to the breastfeeding mother, and could lead to blocked ducts and infection.” According to the court documents, Allen-Brown also e-mailed her supervisor in June 2011 to express her concerns over the condition of lactation facilities, which included offices, semi-public areas, and part of a restroom. After the e-mail, she was sent to the Police and Fire Clinic to undergo a “fitness for duty” evaluation. Because she was unable to wear a vest she was put on an extended limited-duty status by the examining doctor, but shortly thereafter, Allen-Brown was placed on involuntary sick leave by an MPD human resource official. Her request for a limited-duty accommodation beyond the initial six weeks offered to all returning mothers was denied. After her sick leave expired, she was placed on “leave without pay” for approximately nine months, which was the remainder of the time she was breastfeeding. After returning to work Allen-Brown sued MPD on six counts of gender and family responsibility discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and retaliation. After five years, and several legal setbacks, Allen-Brown was eventually granted back pay for the time she was on involuntary leave without pay, her attorney said in an interview. Allen-Brown’s victory—five years later—shows the scope of the legal letdown women face when attempting to use the justice system for their reproductive rights.
Alas, new protections under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, now offer a federal provision that allows mothers to take unpaid, fifteen-minute breaks to pump their milk. In accordance with the Break Time for Nursing Mothers law, employers must provide a clean, private, and nonbathroom space for mothers to express their milk and allow reasonable breaks to do so. The provision also prohibits retaliation by companies against employees who file complaints. However, the law affects only hourly workers, and none of the policies has punitive measures for lack of enforcement.
New laws mean that they have yet to be road tested. “These laws are still very new in general so the cases are a little bit all over the place at the moment,” said Kathy Diane Bailey, attorney for police officer Allen-Brown, in an interview. “I don’t know how it is going to sort out to tell you the truth.”
In 2014 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) took the unprecedented step of filing a lactation discrimination suit against Saint-Gobain Verallia North America, the company where thirty-one-year-old new mom Bobbi Bockoras worked for six years before having a child. Bockoras claimed that when she returned to work as a palletizer operator at a glass factory in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, in June 2013 after giving birth, she planned to pump breast milk during breaks so she could continue nursing her infant daughter, Lyla.
But Bockoras says her supervisors first told her to pump in a bathroom; after she protested, they suggested other alternatives that also failed to meet federal requirements. Bockoras agreed to use a locker room but says it was covered in dirt and dead bugs and lacked air-conditioning. She also said that colleagues harassed her and banged on the door when she was pumping. When she complained, Bockoras says her shifts were reassigned to alternating day and overnight shifts that interfered with her feeding schedule and impeded her milk production—which her lawyers argued was tantamount to retaliation.
Bockoras’s case illustrates the insurmountable obstacles women face while breastfeeding at work. Stories like Bockoras’s show why women are afraid to speak out. As the ACLU senior attorney representing Bockoras said, “[T]hese obstacles … can make [mothers] choose between their jobs and what is in the best interest of their babies.” Given the current economic climate, that is no choice at all.
In Michigan, a former employee of big-box retailer Meijer filed suit against the company in June 2016 alleging that the company failed to accommodate her need to pump milk and created a sexually hostile work environment. The mother, Rachel Keesling, who worked at a Meijer store in Genesee County, was hired in 2013 when she was nursing a three-month-old. According to Keesling’s complaint, over the next year Meijer’s failure to dedicate a legally required lactation room sent Keesling bouncing between a conference room, the store’s bathroom, and a closet-like room that housed the store’s computer server and other communications hardware. At one point, Keesling was docked pay because of delays in finding a place to express milk, her complaint states. When a union steward intervened, Meijer wiped the disciplinary actions from Keesling’s personnel file, and the corporate office sent out a letter to all store managers about the store’s duty under federal law with regard to nursing mothers. But in May 2014, according to the complaint, things took another turn when Keesling was told she could no longer use the server room she had been using. That day, Keesling alleges, a supervisor told her “there were monitored security cameras inside the room.” Apparently a store manager had learned that Keesling was using the room “and had objected to its continued use because … ‘you can see everything,’” Keesling was told. “There’s probably a video of you on the Internet,” another supervisor allegedly told Keesling. “Distraught and humiliated,” Keesling says she and her fiance sought answers from the store director, but the director was “dismissive” and unapologetic, she claims. Though the director denied that the server room had a camera, Keesling says she refused to let her back into it to check. Later, Keesling requested a transfer to a different store “due to the sexually hostile environment created by the invasion of privacy and jokes about Internet videos, because of what had occurred, the
scrutiny of her coworkers and managers, and the emotional distress.” The store director denied Keesling a transfer, however, and Meijer fired her the very next day, “allegedly because she could not come back to the same store where her privacy was violated,” Keesling says. The suit, which is still pending, seeks more than $25,000 in damages.
These cases only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the real-life experiences of mothers in the workplace. The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California says it has documented a nearly 400 percent increase in caregiver discrimination suits filed between 1999 and 2008 when compared to the previous decade. For over a decade, the law center has run a hotline for caregiver discrimination claims, or “family responsibilities discrimination” claims. The center also maintains a comprehensive case database that includes decisions on almost 3,000 caregiver-discrimination cases. For every woman who does file a discrimination complaint there are countless women who suffer in silence—pumping in bathrooms and other inappropriate places—or are too fearful of retaliation or being fired that they dare not even speak up. This is a huge societal problem for mothers. Gender discrimination against pregnant women and caregivers not only jeopardizes women’s careers but also the economic stability of families that increasingly depend on the paychecks of mothers.
Women now make up more than half of the U.S. labor force. Over the past forty years, the share of mothers in the workforce has risen significantly, while men’s real wages over the same period have declined, making the income of working mothers an increasingly important component of household stability. For many families, quitting a job or taking an extended unpaid leave from a full-time job is just not financially tenable. What mothers really need are more policies that allow for colocated child care, flexible time, telecommuting options, and compressed workweeks.
The Big Letdown Page 12
