NEW YORK (AP) – Victoria Cornejo Barrera thought an worker legal hotline sounded too good to be true and wondered if it was a scam.

A month earlier, Cornejo Barrera was forced to resign from her job as a highschool principal in South Carolina after she submitted a doctor’s note asking to be excused from tasks akin to climbing ladders and lifting greater than 20 kilos because she was pregnant. .

For a month she cried and blamed herself for considering she would find a way to maintain her job while pregnant. She used up all of her gathered paid time without work because she couldn’t afford to go without a paycheck. She then received a notice from Human Resources that she would have to begin paying $600 a month to be eligible for medical health insurance while on unpaid leave.

“I felt very guilty. I felt the problem was my pregnancy,” Cornejo Barrera said.

While looking for help online, she got here across a website run by the legal organization A Better Balance that explained about a federal law called the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act that made her eligible for the kind of accommodation she was looking for. It took effect in June 2023, a month before she was fired from her job.

Was the law really on her side? Cornejo Barrera called the hotline.

The first yr of the latest law is complicated

Nearly 500 employees in similar circumstances have contacted A Better Balance’s legal hotline in the yr since the passage of the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act, which strengthens employees’ rights to hunt accommodations for pregnancy-related needs. The experiences of those employees tell a complicated story about the effects of the latest law, which is still unknown to many employers when it finally passed in December 2022, in line with a report released Tuesday by A Better Balance, the organization that led the decade-long campaign for the bill that Congress introduced. .

Most of those employees, mostly women in low-wage jobs, quickly obtained accommodations after learning about their rights and invoking them to employers, said Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance. However, the report found that many ladies still faced employers who didn’t know the law, misunderstood its scope or just refused to comply with it.

Charlotte Burrows, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the law and reaches out to employers and worker groups, said raising awareness was a significant challenge.

“I don’t think we’re where we need to be yet,” Burrows said. “We will work very hard to make sure we close this information gap for everyone.”

But a fierce legal battle over whether the law covers abortion complicates its enforcement.

The dispute centers on EEOC rules that went into effect Tuesday that detail how employers should comply with the law and include abortion amongst the pregnancy-related conditions that entitle employees to time without work and other accommodations.

A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday temporarily barred the EEOC from enforcing its abortion law against employers 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 rule was an illegal interpretation of the act about the honesty of pregnant employees.

Last week, one other judge in Arkansas dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by GOP attorneys general from 17 states, but Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, who is prosecuting the case, said he was considering legal options to proceed the suit.

That lawsuit asks a judge to suspend the entirety of the EEOC’s regulations, which the amicus temporary says could thwart the successful implementation of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Women’s Law Center, together with greater than 20 labor and girls’s groups. laws.

For example, EEOC rules clarify that employers cannot delay filing claims by asking pregnant employees for burdensome documents to support claims about common pregnancy-related limitations, akin to morning sickness or back pain. They also cannot force pregnant employees to take time without work if reasonable accommodations can be found.

The rules set high requirements for employers to prove that granting accommodations would impose an “undue hardship” on their organization.

While the pregnant employee law would remain in effect even without the EEOC’s regulations, supporters say it is a much-needed tool for resolving disputes and training employers to comply with the law. According to A Better Balance, one in seven employees who contacted the hotline since the law went into effect said their employer ordered them to take time without work reasonably than provide them with reasonable accommodations.

Cornejo Barrera was amongst them, but her employer modified its decision after she sent a letter to the human resources department invoking her rights. Within two days, she shared the words of the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act along with her manager, who then told her she could return to work immediately.

When she returned, she saw that there have been posters hanging around the highschool informing employees about the law.

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“It was extremely satisfying to realize that I was right, I wasn’t wrong,” said Cornejo Barerra, who worked until the day before her daughter was born, February 2.

Raquel Robinson, a telecommunications specialist from Ohio, also ultimately prevailed in a similar confrontation along with her company where she has worked for 23 years.

After giving birth to her daughter in October 2022, Robinson was diagnosed with postpartum depression. She took a shower with difficulty and left the house. “Mentally, I just wasn’t in a place where I felt like I was good enough to be my daughter’s mom,” she said. “I couldn’t get her to stop crying.”

After her disability leave led to July 2023, her therapist really useful that she earn a living from home to ease her transition and told her that she was entitled to such accommodation under the latest law. However, her company resisted her request for over a month. During one painful meeting, she realized that the company had shared her personal information, including details about her hygiene struggles, along with her manager-husband, only to insist that nothing she described would interfere along with her ability to do her job in the office .

“I literally burst into tears when I think about it,” she said. “I’m very embarrassed.”

Robinson turned to A Better Balance for help, and the company relented. He’s on the point of return to the office this week after several months of working from home.

Other employees proceed to fight for legal protection.

Earlier this month, A Better Balance filed charges with the EEOC on behalf of two women, alleging violations of the Pregnant Employee Fairness Act. One of them was an worker of a Chick-fil-A franchise in Indiana who said she had points taken away from her punitive attendance system after she sought time to get better from a near miscarriage that sent her to the emergency room. Another involves an Amtrak engineer who said the railroad company marked the first few days of labor as unauthorized absences, putting her liable to being fired, after which refused to accommodate her need to specific milk when she returned to work.

Amtrak declined to comment on the pending litigation. Chick-fil-A referred inquiries to representatives of the franchise, whose owner Jeff Hoffman declined to comment.

The EEOC says it has received 1,869 charges to this point for violations of the Pregnant Employee Fairness Act and has resolved greater than 450, even though it didn’t provide details of those cases.

The issue of abortion complicates the law

The bill was passed in 2022 after years of campaigning by interest groups and girls in low-wage jobs who shared stories of being denied even basic housing. Their experiences helped show that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, while prohibiting employers from firing women just because they became pregnant, did little to offer accommodation in the workplace.

But Republican lawmakers and conservative religious leaders, who overwhelmingly supported the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act, became furious when the EEOC’s rules explicitly covered abortion. Both Republican commissioners on the five-member EEOC voted against the rule.

Citing quite a few court decisions, the EEOC said in its regulations that it follows many years of legal precedent stating that pregnancy-related discrimination laws cover abortion.

Mylissa Farmer, a woman under federal investigation into two hospitals that refused to perform emergency abortions, said her ordeal shows why the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act must cover abortion.

Farmer sought emergency help after her water broke in August 2022 at the starting of the seventeenth week of her pregnancy. Doctors at hospitals in Missouri and Kansas told Farmer that her fetus wouldn’t survive, that her amniotic fluid had depleted and that she was liable to serious infection or fetal loss. her uterus, but they refused to abort her.

While giving birth, she and her husband traveled for hours before a clinic in Illinois provided her with an abortion.

Farmer, who worked as a sales representative in a low-paid job, stated that her supervisor repeatedly contacted her during difficult times to pressure her to return to work. She said the doctor advised her to take two weeks off to get better, but she returned to work after two days because she was afraid of being fired. But after her absences, she needed to face discipline to deal with the physical and mental trauma of losing her pregnancy, including an occasional breakdown on the strategy to meeting clients.

“I was simply unable to provide myself with the care I needed at the time, and it was very difficult for me to even cope with the emotional loss of what we were going through,” said Farmer, represented by the National Women’s Law Center, in her criticism to the Centers for Medicare Services and Medicaid.

Eventually, she and her husband left their jobs and moved to Oregon along with her sister to try to begin over. However, it didn’t work and so they became homeless for a while.

The couple have since rebuilt their lives with latest jobs, but live in an undisclosed location because of the backlash they faced.

“I don’t think a lot of people in these low-paid positions realize that in these types of situations, you can replace someone very easily,” Farmer said.