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This week, the Supreme Court got Johnson’s back. They ruled 6-3 in favor of Peggy Young, a UPS worker who was instead forced onto unpaid leave when she was pregnant. Young, at the time, said she was willing and able to keep working as a letter carrier. But despite UPS’s willingness to make adjustments for male co-workers with disabilities, she was pushed off the job because she was advised to avoid lifting parcels heavier than twenty pounds.
The Supreme Court decided Young should have been able to keep working for UPS and the company was required by law to accommodate her, clarifying the protections of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law sought to expand sex discrimination protections by mandating that employers accommodate pregnant workers in a way that was comparable to other workers with similar impairments. Under a narrow reading of the law, the process of proving discrimination “on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” requires the worker to show that a non-pregnant worker who faced a “similar” disability would receive more favorable accommodation. This business-friendly reading currently gives employers room to wriggle out of the mandate by contending that pregnancy is a special category of impairment, and thus isn’t exactly comparable to other temporary disabilities that employers cover under disability policies.
But activists have long criticized this interpretation for placing the burden of proof on the worker to show that her circumstances are technically analogous to the needs of a non-pregnant co-worker “similar in their ability or inability to work.” In contrast, under the more stringent Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), to be exempt from “reasonable accommodation” standards, an employer must demonstrate that the accommodation would cause “undue hardship” for the business.
The Supreme Court ruled that if a workplace was already accommodating other, basically analogous forms of disability, it was up to the employer to justify the refusal to accommodate a pregnant woman—rather than force the pregnant woman to prove she deserved equal treatment. So a pregnant worker should be able to demand a reasonable accommodation at work, like being able to sit on a stool instead of standing at a counter all day. The ethical logic here is a feminist concept: a woman shouldn’t have to prove to her boss why she deserves the same rights at work as a male coworker.
Pregnancy discrimination is an issue not just of labor rights but of reproductive justice, since the kind of flexibility that pregnant workers require is often denied to women in more low-paying, physically demanding work, which, according to a National Women’s Law Center’s analysis, disproportionately affects low-income women, “women of color and immigrant women.” Since the majority of women entering the workforce are projected to be pregnant on the job at some point, employers who ignore all their needs are both eroding the principle of gender equality and foreclosing the economic potential of a huge swath of the population.
Several states, including California and Illinois, have already enacted additional anti-discrimination protections for pregnant workers, folding into a broader push to strengthen safeguards for workers in precarious jobs, who are burdened by a combination of low wages, unstable schedules and no paid leave time.
Recognizing that pregnancy requires both the right to workplace accommodation and the right to negotiate for fair working conditions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently affirmed that pregnant workers were generally entitled to accommodations comparable to those offered to workers with temporary disabilities.
Advocates are now urging Congress to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would bring the 1978 protections into line with the standards of the ADA. A clear nationwide standard, according to Vicki Shabo of the National Partnership for Women and Families, would protect all women at work, “eliminating the need for workers to go to court to determine whether an employer must provide accommodations for pregnancy,” thus ensuring their rights at work aren’t dependent on an employer’s whim. UPS and Walmart, for example, have reformed their pregnancy policies, but only after facing legal and political pressure—though Walmart insists its pregnancy policy well exceeds federal standards.
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