onsexandgender:After a Respect the Bump campaign that highlighted Tiffany Beroid’s plight, and weeks
onsexandgender:After a Respect the Bump campaign that highlighted Tiffany Beroid’s plight, and weeks after three groups filed a class-action complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Walmart has revamped its pregnancy policy, saying it will now provide “reasonable accommodations” for temporary disabilities caused by pregnancy. The groups — A Better Balance, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Mehri & Skalet law firm in Washington D.C. — had accused Walmart, the largest private employer in the world, of having “a nationwide policy and practice of pregnancy discrimination”:Walmart’s Accommodation in Employment policy had explicitly stated that pregnancy was a condition eligible only for minor job adjustments and that pregnant workers were ineligible for the reassignments and transfers of nonessential job duties given to workers with disabilities.As a result, pregnant workers were denied the types of reasonable accommodations that workers with disabilities received, even though they had the same medical need and the same ability to work. This difference in treatment violated the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). The [three groups’] investigation also revealed that Walmart had a policy of refusing to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy-related disabilities, which violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).washingtonpostWomen’s rights groups say they hadn’t encountered any large employer with a pregnancy policy so unfriendly to women as Walmart’s.In Tiffany Beroid’s case, the policy meant she was forced to take unpaid leave from her job as a customer service manager, the Post reported:With no work, Beroid couldn’t afford tuition payments for her community college nursing program, which meant missing the final exam; she’ll have to take the class over. Her husband, a security guard, pulled 18-hour shifts to keep paying the rent.Approximately three-quarters of Walmart’s workforce is female. A company spokesperson told the Post that Beroid and other activists didn’t force the change.“Our previous policies met or exceeded state and federal law. Now with our new policy, we’re going above what the law requires. We believed it was the right decision for our associates, and we made it.”salon has a Q&A with Beroid hereMeanwhile, my ProPublica piece about another important Walmart class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit can be found here -- source link