The hot-button issue of breast feeding breaks at work recently has been pushed into the national spotlight with new legislation and a high-profile lawsuit.

An obscure provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act championed by President Obama requires employers to provide reasonable unpaid breaks for nursing mothers to express milk for their newborns.  No time limit is set on the number of breaks; in companies with 50 or more employees, employers must provide a private space that locks that is not a restroom and not visible to the public. The breaks aren't required to be paid unless required by state law or perhaps by an employee's exempt status. The United States Department of Labor is expected to issue additional regulations to implement this new rule.  Nearly half the states already have in place rules requiring the accommodation of nursing mothers.

Although from an unlikely source, the protection for breast feeding mothers is long overdue.  A New York woman recently filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from her job for breast feeding.  Yardiris Rivera says after giving birth to her daughter Erin, she intended to breast feed as long as she could.  According to Rivera, her employers had other plans.  Rivera alleges her breast feeding created tension at her work place, Medical Imaging of Manhattan. When she returned from maternity leave, her bosses told Rivera to stop breast feeding at work. After she refused to stop, her bosses made it increasingly more difficult for her to pump breast milk while she was at work. Rivera says that she was made to pump milk in a dirty restroom stall that was tiny and unsanitary. As a final blow, Rivera was laid off in February. She contacted an attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union who filed a state and federal complaint against Medical Imaging of Manhattan. The company claims Rivera was part of a layoff that had nothing to do with her breast feeding.

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“Mommy tracking” is something that few talk about but many still experience in the workplace. Mommy tracking, if you are not familiar with the term, is the polite description for discriminating against women who have full-time careers but also have families. What makes this discrimination especially insidious is the glass ceiling it assists in enforcing on working women. For some, mommy tracking basically says, “We’ll offer you benefits and flexibility up to a certain point, but don’t expect any promotions or new opportunities.”  

The dirty secret of mommy tracking might be blown wide open as one of the biggest of such cases rocked the financial and legal world last week. Legendary global investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street icon since the late 1800s, was hit with a discrimination lawsuit from a former female employee who claims that the company treats working moms like “second-class citizens.”

A former employee of Goldman Sachs University, the company’s in-depth educational and training program, Charlotte Hanna, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan last Wednesday. The lawsuit alleges that Hanna faced discrimination after having her first child in 2005 and was wrongfully terminated during maternity leave after she had her second child in 2009. As a former vice president of GSU, Hanna opted for a part-time schedule to accommodate her family obligations. Goldman Sachs offered part-time tracking to women specifically to address the balance of work and family.

Hanna was naturally surprised when she was fired in 2009 and to find her position was being eliminated. Hanna was shocked even more so when she learned that an alleged 75% of fellow employees whose jobs were terminated at the same time consisted of other women who were fired while on maternity leave. Lawyers for Charlotte Hanna consider this to be a clear message of how Goldman Sachs feels about mothers as employees.

While Goldman Sachs has issued no response to the lawsuit, and no trial date has been set, “mommy tracking” has officially become a water cooler topic and is no longer a corporate secret.

Expecting a child is usually a happy and exciting time for new mothers. For LuShonda Smith and Charity Brooks of Kansas City, however, the joys of pregnancy were soured when each was subjected to workplace discrimination that resulted in both women losing their jobs.

When Imagine Schools, Inc., a nationwide operator of charter schools, decided to close one of its Kansas City middle schools in favor of reopening a combination high school and middle school, Smith, an office manager, and Brooks, an administrative assistant, were both fired. Both women claim that their employment with Imagine Schools, Inc. was terminated not because of poor performance but because LuShonda Smith and Charity Brooks were both pregnant at the time.

This week, Imagine Schools agreed to pay $570,000 to settle a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of the two women by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The lawsuit, filed in September 2008 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, claimed that Imagine Schools was guilty of pregnancy discrimination when it chose not to rehire Smith and Brooks at the new school. Pregnancy discrimination is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

The $570,000 will go toward back pay for the two women as well as emotional distress damages and all attorneys' fees. Imagine Schools, Inc. has also agreed to  a court approved decree that requires the national company to disseminate a policy on pregnancy discrimination, report all acts of discrimination to the EEOC, and prominently post an official notice that states employee rights as covered by federal anti discrimination laws.

The EEOC, while pleased with the outcome of this particular settlement, is quick to note that pregnancy discrimination has slowly and quietly been on the rise. According to a study done by the agency, pregnancy discrimination charges have increased from 4,160 in 2000 to a staggering 6,196 in 2009.

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Jennifer Paviglianti of Centereach, New York wanted to keep her pregnancy quiet from her boss John Doxey until she reached the three-month mark. Doxey is the owner of the gentlemen’s club Café Royale, and Jennifer is a bartender there, or at least she was. Gossip amongst her fellow employees reached Doxey before she was able to tell him the news of her pregnancy herself. Paviglianti says her now former employer immediately assumed that the pregnant bartender would be unable to do her job and she was soon fired from her position.   

On February 2, Jennifer Paviglianti filed charges of discrimination based on sex discrimination, retaliation, perceived disability discrimination, and pregnancy discrimination with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  According to Paviglianti, her employer repeatedly told her that customers of the Café Royal would not be pleased to see a pregnant woman behind the bar as they expected to be served by sexy bartenders. Furthermore, she claims that John Doxey told her that her pregnancy and appearance were actually hurting business.  

Soon, Jennifer found her shifts falling off the schedule and saw her paychecks dwindle. She claims he was trying to get her to quit and hitting her where it hurt. He also hired another bartender on the nights that she worked to cut into her already disappearing tips. The abuse, says Paviglianti, continued with Doxey finding ways to make her job more difficult, like forcing her to clean the bar with ammonia rather than safer products for pregnant women.  

Jennifer Paviglianti started to sense something was wrong so she did some research. After discovering that cases of employee discrimination were extremely hard to prove, she concocted a plan to tape record her boss. With little coaxing and within the confines of the law, Jennifer easily captured her boss on tape saying discriminating things about her being pregnant and how her condition was negatively affecting business. This tape became the smoking gun that Jennifer needed. Armed with the tape, lawyers, and her complaint with the EEOC, Jennifer has a real shot of protecting other pregnant women form facing the kind of discrimination she has.