NEW YORK (news agencies) — Victoria Cornejo Barrera thought the legal helpline for workers sounded too good to be true and wondered if it was a scam.
A month earlier, Cornejo Barrera had been forced to take leave from her job as head custodian at a South Carolina high school after she turned in a doctor’s note asking to be exempt from tasks like climbing ladders and lifting more than 20 pounds because she was pregnant.
She spent a month crying and blaming herself for thinking she could keep her job while pregnant. She used up all her accumulated paid time off because she couldn’t afford to go without a paycheck. Then she got a notice from human resources saying she would have to start paying $600 a month to stay on health insurance while on unpaid leave.
“I was feeling so guilty. I was feeling like my pregnancy was the problem,” Cornejo Barrera said.
Searching for help online, she came across the website run by the legal advocacy organization A Better Balance, explaining about a federal law called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act that entitled her to the types accommodations she had been seeking. It had gone into effect in June 2023, a month before she was pushed out of her job.
Was the law really on her side? Cornejo Barrera called the helpline.
Nearly 500 workers in similar circumstances have contacted A Better Balance’s legal helpline in the year since the implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which strengthens the rights of workers to seek accommodations for pregnancy-related needs. The experiences of those workers tell a complicated story about the impact of a new law that is still unfamiliar to many employers, according to a report released Tuesday by A Better Balance, the organization that spearheaded a decade-long campaign for the law, which Congress finally passed in December 2022.
The majority of those workers, mostly women in low-wage jobs, swiftly obtained accommodation after learning about their rights and invoking them with their employers, said Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance. But many women still confronted employers who didn’t know about the law, misunderstood its scope or simply refused to comply, according to the report.
Charlotte Burrows, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the law and conducts outreach to employers and labor groups, said raising awareness is a major challenge.
“I don’t think we’re where we need to be yet,” Burrows said. “We’re going to be trying very hard to make sure that we close that information gap for everybody.”
A bitter legal battle over whether the law covers abortion, however, is complicating its enforcement.
The dispute centers on EEOC regulations that took effect Tuesday detailing how employers should comply with the law, and which included abortion among the pregnancy-related conditions that entitle workers to time off and other accommodations.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Louisiana temporarily prohibited the EEOC from enforcing the abortion provision of its rules against employers located in Louisiana and Mississippi, or against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and three other religious groups that filed a consolidated lawsuit against the EEOC, arguing that the abortion provision is an illegal interpretation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
Another judge in Arkansas last week dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general from 17 states, but Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, who is leading the case, said he is considering legal options to continue pursuing the challenge.
That lawsuit had asked the judge to suspend the EEOC rules in their entirety, a prospect that the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Women’s Law Center, along with more than 20 labor and women’s advocacy groups, warned in amicus briefs could thwart the successful implementation of law.
The EEOC’s rules, for example, make clear that employers cannot delay requests by asking pregnant workers for onerous paperwork to back claims of common pregnancy-related limitations such as morning sickness or back pain. They also cannot force pregnant workers to take leave when reasonable accommodations are available.
The rules outline the high bar employers must meet to prove that granting accommodations would impose “undue hardship” for their organization.
Although the pregnant workers law would remain in place even without the EEOC rules, advocates say it’s a badly needed tool for settling disputes and training employers on compliance. According to A Better Balance, one out of seven workers who contacted its helpline since the law took effect said their employers had ordered them to take leave rather than grant them reasonable accommodations.
Cornejo Barrera was among them, but her employer reversed the decision after she sent her human resources department a letter invoking her rights. Within two days, she shared language from the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act with her supervisor, who then told her she could return to work immediately.
When she went back, she saw that posters informing employees about the law had been added at the high school.
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