Legal landscape note: This article was originally published in 2014 and describes the law as it stood at that time. New Jersey law changes frequently.
You are pregnant, your doctor has limited what you can lift or how long you can stand, and your employer's answer is unpaid leave instead of the light-duty assignment it hands to other workers. Whether that answer is legal was the question the U.S. Supreme Court took up in late 2014 in Young v. UPS, a case testing how far employers must go to accommodate pregnant workers under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Our view then, as now: all reasonable accommodations should be made for expectant mothers, and the law requires reasonable accommodations -- not accommodations so burdensome that a business cannot feasibly continue the employment relationship. The hard questions arise in the space between those two principles.
Peggy Young drove a delivery truck for UPS. When her pregnancy limited her ability to lift the heaviest packages -- a small fraction of her workload -- she asked for a light-duty assignment. UPS refused and placed her on unpaid leave without health benefits, even though the company had given temporary light-duty assignments to workers with on-the-job injuries, workers with disabilities, and drivers who had lost their commercial licenses after off-the-job DUI convictions. That inconsistency was central to Young's argument, and UPS later changed its policy to cover pregnancy-related accommodations.
The legal question turned on the 1978 statute's command that employers treat pregnant women the same as other employees who are "similar in their ability or inability to work." Young argued the comparison should be to the workers who received accommodations; UPS argued a pregnant worker must be similar in all respects to the accommodated categories, not merely similar in her inability to work.
The case drew attention across the political spectrum, and the outcome mattered for every workplace. New Jersey employees also have independent state-law protections: the Legislature amended the Law Against Discrimination in 2014 to expressly require reasonable accommodation of pregnancy. If you believe you have been treated unfairly at work because of a pregnancy, an employment attorney can help you evaluate both your federal and state claims.
Based on a Star-Ledger Editorial Board piece, December 11, 2014.