In countries such as the United States that lack maternity or parental leave beyond 6-8 weeks, workplace accommodations for lactating workers are essential. Without breast milk expression accommodations, women employees must choose between breastfeeding their children and full employment. Recognizing that many health organizations recommend nursing for at least 12-24 months, various laws have been passed to enable the combination of work and continued breastfeeding.
Yet, even with laws mandating employer accommodations for lactating employees, not all organizations provide the support that these women need. Lactation-at-work legislation (like any labor law) does not automatically expand workers’ rights and improve employment conditions. Human resource specialists must craft policies in reaction to civil rights laws, and their supervising managers then must apply those policies to their employees’ work lives. Differences in interpretations and applications of lactation-at-work laws result in substantial variation between organizations in how well lactating workers are supported. Because of this, within my book — Expressing Milk, Expressed Concern, and the Expressive Value of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022) — I was able to identify organizational policies that are exemplars for women employees, as well as policies that fail to support lactating workers.
Beginning with the latter, some organizations’ policies comply with the letter of the law, but do not ameliorate the struggles of lactating women employees, creating lactation accommodations that satisfy the law but are purely symbolic. For example, if lactation rooms are significantly far from where the lactating employee works, she will need to use much of her breaktime to travel to the room. If the organizational policy only allows limited breaktime for lactating workers, much of her break will be used in travel with little remaining for expressing milk, cleaning the apparatus, or dis/assembling her pump.
Other organizations focus less on the law itself and, instead, reinterpret legal compliance through the lens of managerial goals, finding ways to comply that support objectives management already supports, yet also creating possible solutions for their lactating workers. For example, some organizations create lactation rooms in response to the law, but then benefit further from them by promoting their presence for recruitment purposes.
Still other organizations went beyond policies that furthered managerial goals to create successful accommodations for lactating workers. Often, these organizations have individual human resource specialists and supervising managers with personal or close second-hand experience with expressing breast milk. These allies push for organizational policies to directly aid lactating workers’ efforts, usually before any law or policy is even in place. Other organizations with successful lactation accommodations have supervising managers who initially were only perfunctorily supportive, but eventually became staunch advocates. These managers shifted away from focusing on either the legal directive or the managerial objectives. Over time, these managers embraced health-related reasons for supporting the pro-lactation policies and becoming strong advocates for effective lactation-at-work accommodations.
In many ways, the U.S. Lactation at Work Law is a success — a much-needed law that mandates necessary accommodation for lactating employees. Indeed, it is one of the few civil right laws in the United States that appears to accomplish much of its goal. However, some scholars and activists question whether the Lactation at Work Law truly helps lactating workers. Some might describe this law as not family friendly but work friendly. The presence of this law encourages women to return to work as quickly as possible, while they still must care for and nurse their infants. From a policy standpoint, this law allows U.S. employers to shift the discussion away from the lack of sufficient, paid maternity leave, on-site childcare, or other accommodations that would make the need to express milk at one’s workplace unnecessary.
In countries without maternity or parental leave, workplace accommodations for lactating workers are essential. However, not all organizations provide the support that these women need. Differences in interpretations and applications of lactation-at-work laws result in substantial variation between organizations. Some organizations comply with the letter of the law but do not ameliorate the struggles of lactating women employees. Other organizations have successful lactation accommodations because they have individual human resource specialists and supervising managers with personal or close second-hand experience with expressing breast milk. The U.S. Lactation at Work Law is a success, but not family-friendly.
Elizabeth Hoffmann is a Professor of Sociology in Purdue's College of Liberal Arts and affiliated faculty for American Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies.
