After more than a decade of advocacy, workplace accommodations for pregnant people are finally law as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) takes effect.
The law, which passed Congress in December, requires that employers provide accommodations for pregnancy-related medical conditions— everything from pregnancy to childbirth to postpartum recovery.
It undoes a previous requirement that said employees must prove they should be accommodated. Instead, the onus will now be on employers to work in good faith with workers to provide accommodations.
The idea to expand protections dates back to 2011, when Dina Bakst, the cofounder and co-president of A Better Balance: The Work & Family Legal Center, realized pregnant workers who were turning to the organization for help were not sufficiently covered under existing law. It was an issue of racial equity — many were women of color working in low-paying jobs.
Elizabeth Gedmark, the current vice president at A Better Balance said the road to passage was difficult because so few people knew anything about the issue. “What we heard so frequently was people said, ‘We had no idea this was a problem, that pregnant workers were falling through the gaps in the law,’” Gedmark said. “And then in the last 10 years, we still continued to hear that. We worked to raise awareness about it, but even now as we are making sure that people know about the PWFA, there are still some who don’t understand why it was necessary, who thought that it already was covered.”