As an expecting parent, you’re likely to encounter a dizzying array of information and advice about how to incubate, birth, and raise a healthy child. What to expect from your body during your pregnancy? There’s a book for that. Natural childbirth? Check. Sleep training? There’s a method for everyone. But when problems crop up at work because of your pregnancy or parenthood, where do you turn?
Although women entering the workplace today start their careers better educated than their male peers and at near parity in wages, they fall behind when they become mothers (more than 80 percent of women in the United States have children by the time they’re forty-four years old). Studies show pregnant women and mothers experience widespread wage and hiring discrimination and only a fraction have access to paid sick time and family leave to care for a new child. Simply put, pregnancy is a key trigger for inequality that endures across a woman’s lifetime: motherhood is the biggest risk factor for poverty among women in old age. This is the shameful status quo in the United States in 2014.
In 2005, Dina Bakst cofounded A Better Balance (ABB): The Work and Family Legal Center with a group of fellow women’s rights lawyers to tackle this problem. Together they wanted to strengthen legal protections for caregivers and to promote policies that allow all workers, particularly pregnant women and new mothers, to care for their families without risking their financial security. A Better Balance, where all the authors of this book work, is dedicated to promoting fairness in the workplace and has become a leader in the fight to expand paid leave for parents and caregivers, combat workplace discrimination based on pregnancy and family status, and increase access to flexible and predictable work schedules.
We are happy to report that we are making substantial headway on all of these fronts with incredible legislative victories. Over the past year, A Better Balance drafted Rhode Island’s successful family leave insurance law—the third of its kind in the country—and helped advance the federal FAMILY Act, which proposes to fund paid family leave for all Americans. We recently shepherded new laws guaranteeing paid sick time to workers in Portland, Oregon; Jersey City and Newark, New Jersey; and in our own hometown of New York City. We secured groundbreaking legal rights for pregnant women in New York City, and advanced similar laws in New Jersey, Minnesota, and West Virginia, so workers can stay healthy and employed when they need a modest accommodation, including time off to safely recover from childbirth. And we supported San Francisco legislators as they passed one of the first workplace flexibility laws in the country. We also opened our A Better Balance Southern Office, based in Nashville, TN, to bring our successful model of advocacy and direct services where it is greatly needed. There is still so much work to be done, but we are excited about the momentum we see.
Although the core of our advocacy is focused on policy change, we have always been committed to educating the public and helping individuals understand their legal rights. Legislation is only effective when workers know about their rights and feel confident using them when needed. Unfortunately, confusion is widespread: for example, in one of our recent trainings in New York, not one participant was certain whether she had a legal right to pump breast milk at work. In fact, half the room thought it was acceptable for a boss to insist a nursing mother pump breast milk in a bathroom stall. It’s no wonder: the internet is chock-full of misinformation, and too many workers, especially those in low-wage, inflexible jobs, cannot rely on the goodwill of their employers to make sure they’re treated fairly.
In 2009, we launched a free legal clinic in New York for low-income workers who have problems at work related to their pregnancy and family responsibilities. Since then we’ve received hundreds of phone calls from men and women with questions about parental leave, pregnancy discrimination, sick time, flexible work, and dozens of other issues. We’ve counseled workers about how to speak with their bosses, where to apply for benefits, and how to protect themselves when they suspect discrimination. We convinced one of the largest employers in Brooklyn to change its policy to allow pregnant women who could still do their jobs with accommodations to continue working, and helped an expecting mother get back on her feet after she was forced out of work and into a homeless shelter. Some of the women we have counseled have joined our advocacy as well, harnessing their stories and their passion as agents for change.
We love this work, but as a small organization we have limited capacity to offer personal assistance to everyone in need. We wanted to extend our reach to a broader audience of people across the country who, like our callers, are confused about their rights or simply do not know how existing laws could help them stay on the job. Where is the book for this, we wondered? And thus, Babygate was born.
We wrote Babygate to provide a comprehensive resource for expecting and new parents about their workplace rights and to fill a gap in the canon of parenting literature. But we had another motive as well. While Babygate is a tool for self-help, individuals cannot, and should not, be expected to solve what is, fundamentally, a systemic problem of work–family incompatibility. Throughout this book we highlight how poorly the United States stacks up against other countries when it comes to supporting working families and how dramatically worker rights and protections vary by state: for example, pregnant and new mothers in New York are entitled to a maximum disability payment of $170/week if they cannot work while pregnant or recovering from childbirth, while mothers in California may receive up to $1,075/week and up to four months of job-protected leave. Our goal is to educate but also to inspire a bit of outrage. In fact, we chose the title Babygate to evoke the idea of a scandal. Why is the richest country in the world also one of only a handful without any guarantee of paid time off for new mothers? Why, in 2014, are we still fighting for the ability to stay home when we, or our children, are sick without risk of losing income or a job? Why do news stories about work and family consistently focus on women’s choices, and not on the structures of outdated policies and social institutions that constrain those choices?
We believe that mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and other family caregivers deserve better. Our economy is built on their invisible and free labor, whether it is the education and socialization of the next generation of workers or the comfort and care of the elderly. We all benefit from this resource, and yet, as a society, we take it for granted and do little to ensure its continued vigor. Our work at A Better Balance, and this book, is dedicated to changing that reality.
Blending work and parenthood is a constant challenge—we know; we’ve been there. Although there is no perfect solution, we hope Babygate can provide some answers. We hope the pages that follow will inform and empower you, giving you the confidence to stand up for yourself at work and the inspiration to stand up for working families everywhere.
INTRODUCTION
Are you pregnant or thinking about taking that step? Maybe your partner is pregnant, and you are trying to plan for the big changes that await you. Or perhaps you are eagerly anticipating a new baby through adoption. No matter how you got here, welcome!
You’ve probably been reading about what to expect from pregnancy and how to prepare for childbirth. Maybe you’ve even started thinking about the early days of parenthood and how to care for your new baby. We are here to help you learn about your legal rights as an expecting or new parent. Specifically, we want to help you plan how to integrate pregnancy and parenthood into your work life. How do you plan for maternity/parental leave? What are you entitled to? What do you do if you suspect workplace discrimination? What if you want to work part-time after your child is born?
Don’t know the answers to these questions? You are not alone. We work on these issues every day and talk with plenty of people who don’t understand their rights as working parents. Many more don’t realize how limited their rights are in comparison to the rights of parents in other countries around the world. For example, we got a call to our hotline from a woman who was born in Denmark, where parent-friendly laws are the norm. Helena was now living in the United States and was pregnant with twins. She worked for a small company that didn’t offer any paid maternity leave. Her boss wanted her to return to work two weeks after her babies were born, but Helena (understandably) wanted more time to recover from giving birth and to bond with her newborns. Helena couldn’t get much information out of her employer, but she thought she was entitled to twelve weeks of unpaid leave under federal law. Unfortunately, because her employer was too small to be covered