The Daily - The Rampant Problem of Pregnancy Discrimination, Part 1

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

A New York Times investigation finds that pregnancy discrimination is systematic and pervasive inside America’s biggest companies. For women with physically demanding jobs, the bias is often overt. Guests: Natalie Kitroeff, who covers the economy for The Times, and Otisha Woolbright, who lost her job at Walmart after asking about maternity leave. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, women are being sidelined, passed over for promotions and raises, and fired when they complain. A Times investigation finds that pregnancy discrimination is rampant inside America's biggest companies. It's Tuesday, June 26th.

So about six months ago, there was this explosion of Me Too coverage, and my colleague Jessica Silver-Greenberg and I were at the same time hearing stories of pregnancy discrimination on our beats. And we thought it was something we had to look into. Natalie Kittroweth covers the economy for The Times. And that's around the time that we came across this woman, Otisha Wolbright. Otisha Wolbright. I was born in Fort Myers, Florida. Then my mom moved me and my brother to Jacksonville,

and I was a very young, young girl. She grew up in the 80s in Florida. You know, my mom worked hard. She worked two jobs. She took care of me and my brother. You know, there was never no government assistance or anything like that. She wasn't wealthy, but she said she had everything she needed. I mean, I had a pretty decent life growing up as a child. I can't complain.

She started working early as a teenager. I got a job at KFC. Then as a server at a diner. And then from the diner, I transferred to a car wash detailing place. And after that job, she gets pregnant and has a baby. That was my first child. And then she has two more kids. And Otisha is a single mom at this point, and she's looking for something a little more stable, a job that pays better, that comes with benefits, a place where she feels like she can move up the ladder. And one day, she's shopping at Walmart.

And I was walking around, and I saw my friend, and I was like, hey, how you doing? And she was like, I was like, since when you been working here? This is how the conversation played out briefly. And I was like, can you help me get a job here? And as she hears more about Walmart, it seems like this perfect opportunity. It's everything she was looking for. It's a big company, and she thinks she can grow there. So she applies for the job, and she gets it.

She gets the job. That's when I started working at Walmart. I was happy. I was really happy because I was going to be getting paid more money than what I usually get paid. I was, you know, just the big picture. I just saw the big picture, the big picture. So she starts this new job.

She's working in the deli and the bakery at Walmart. And the bakery, you know, requires us to go in the freezer, take all the frozen bread, take the boxes out, lift the boxes, you know, move stuff around to get what bread we're looking for. And then on the deli side, you take out your rotisserie chickens, which they store them inside like a cooler like. And they come inside this box. The box weighs between 35 to 50 pounds. So they're pretty heavy.

It's pretty hard work, but Otisha says she likes it and she finally feels like she's on the path to a stable career. That's when I was able to move into my apartment, my first apartment by myself, just me and my children. So yes, I was happy. But then one day, things started to change. I was in the freezer taking out the bread to get ready to start my cycle over again

to get them ready for the next day so that I can put them inside to get them proofed and ready for the next morning. And that's when the sharp pain hit and I went to the bathroom and I seen that I was bleeding. I had not said nothing, but when I went to the bathroom and I seen that I was bleeding. I had not said nothing. But when I went to the hospital, that's when they told me I was pregnant.

And they wanted me to stop doing heavy lifting to avoid miscarriage. I believe it was like nothing that weighs more than 20 pounds. And the doctor tells you that specifically? Don't lift boxes because if you lift boxes, you might miscarry, you might lose the baby. Yes. Hmm. I left the emergency room, went home, went to sleep,

woke up, went to work, waited for the manager to come in to talk to her about what was going on and explain to her about what the doctor said, showed her the paperwork. I told her the doctor told me no heavy lifting for over more than 20 pounds. But my job consisted me to do heavy lifting. And what did she say? Oh, my goodness. She said a lot of things. Like what? She told me Demi Moore did somersaults on the stage at nine months pregnant. Running, you know, you got to take it easy.

I took up a little gymnastics. Demi Moore, the actress? Yes, the actress. I'm not Demi Moore. Would you like to see some? Yes, I would. Demi Moore, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, my God.

Here we go. Jeez, what a... So your manager said, Oh, Tisha, look, I'm sorry. Your doctor said you can't lift boxes, but I once saw Demi Moore on television, very pregnant, doing acrobatics on a stage. She didn't even apologize about nothing.

She just compared me to Demi Moore and told me that Demi Moore didics on a stage. She didn't even apologize about nothing. She just compared me to Demi Moore and told me that Demi Moore did that on the stage. And if Demi Moore could do it, there shouldn't be no problem with me working. It's Demi Moore, kids. We'll be right back. She also put it to me as, you know, if I can't do the job, then I can go out and walk out the doors.

So I really didn't have a choice. So I'm looking at it like this. I have this place. I have my rent. I'm pregnant. I just have to be careful. I'm just going to go ahead on and keep the job and do what I'm supposed to do and just take it.

I just had no choice but to just weather the storm. Hmm. So she just kept going to work. She kept lifting those heavy boxes of bread and chicken, and things were fine for a little while. I was picking up one of those heavy boxes of chicken, rotisserie chicken, let's be more specific. And when I lift, I had this sharp shooting pain on my back, on the left and the right side, and it shot down and it went from all the way up from my shoulder blade all the way down my leg to my foot. I almost dropped the whole box on my feet, but I caught myself.

And I was hurting so bad. I was having muscle spasms, like a seizure in my body. I was taken to the emergency room. They gave me medication. They told me I needed to sit home for a while. They checked the baby. The doctor was like, you shouldn't be doing all this heavy lifting, and you know that from the first visit.

But Otisha kept showing up for work, and she's getting bigger and bigger and closer and closer to her due date, and she's starting to wonder what she's going to do when this baby is born. So she goes to her manager. I said, do you know any information as far as leave of absence? She gave me a number to call, and I applied. And when I got back to work the next day, they called me to the office. And they was like, well, I wanted to bring to your attention that we did receive your request.

Like, well, I wanted to bring to your attention that we did receive your request. And they told me that I was a temporary associate and Walmart no longer need my services. They basically let you go. Yep. I was so devastated. I was just like thinking, what am I going to do? Because I was, you know, a single parent. I had three kids.

I had this baby on the way. Why nobody going to hire a seven-month pregnant woman? Who was going gonna do that i did everything that they ever asked me to do and when they let me go i was so sad and i was so i was so hurt i couldn't even talk when they told me that they no longer need my services. I was at that point thinking, what is the point of me being here? We'll be right back. Anyone hearing Otisha's story would be sympathetic. She struggled hard to get a job at Walmart. It represented a big leap in her career.

But I imagine that there are some people who will hear her story and view it from Walmart's perspective, which is, here's a person hired to do a job who can no longer do that job. And so why should this company continue to employ her? The question of what companies have to do with pregnant workers is for sure an intense debate and one that dates back to the 70s. Forty-three women, including seven from this General Electric was not discriminating when it didn't offer pregnant women paid leave when they took time off to have children, despite offering paid leave to other workers who took time off for other reasons. The Supreme Court ruled an employer does not have to give sick pay to women employees who are out from work having babies. Because, it said, many women aren't pregnant.

So how can a policy be discriminatory towards women when many of them are not pregnant? In Philadelphia, representatives of women's groups met today to plan legislation to counteract the Supreme Court ruling last week. There was a big public outcry. And basically people were saying, wait a minute, this is insane. A policy says pregnant women don't get the same accommodations as disabled people is discriminating against women. And so Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. The legislation which we are introducing does not force employers to provide this kind of insurance. That act said employers, if they are accommodating people who are similarly situated to pregnant people,

they have to accommodate pregnant people. And that women who happen to become pregnant should not be separated out and treated differently from their male counterparts. So after the Supreme Court ruled that companies don't have to accommodate pregnant people the way that they do disabled people, Congress then passes a law saying that they do. That's right. And it seemed like a win for pregnant women, but it didn't settle everything. And it seemed like a win for pregnant women, but it didn't settle everything. Employers in court said that pregnant women were more like people who got injured off the job.

Employers hadn't injured anybody off the job, and they hadn't made anyone get pregnant either. So why should they have to accommodate people like that? And so when women took their companies to court, the companies won. But then along comes Peggy Young. I actually drove a minivan and carried my packages, small letters, in the seat next to me in my van. Peggy Young is an early morning driver for UPS. She gets pregnant and she gets a note from her doctor that says, My doctor recommended me not lift anything over 20 pounds. She probably shouldn't lift really heavy boxes. And she takes that note to UPS.

UPS explained to me that they do not provide light duty for pregnancy. UPS says, tough luck. If you can't lift heavy boxes, you can't work here. Basically, they said, you know, go home until you're no longer pregnant. The thing is that UPS didn't respond that way to other people who asked for light duty. They accommodated a lot of different kinds of workers who were asking for light duty, including people who lost their driver's license because of drunk driving. lost their driver's license because of drunk driving. So Peggy sues, and she loses and loses and loses and takes her case all the way to the Supreme Court.

We'll hear argument first this morning in case 12-1226, Young v. United Parcel Service. In oral arguments, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg challenges the UPS lawyer to provide a single instance in which someone is denied an accommodation who is not a pregnant person. Is there an employee who asked for dispensation because of a medical condition that restricted her ability to lift? her ability to lift. To any single employee that wrote back who was said, sorry, you don't get it because your injury was off duty.

There's not a name provided in the record because one was not elicited by the petitioner whose burden it was in building a prima facie case. The lawyer draws a blank. Suggesting that anytime a man had asked for an accommodation, they had received it. But suddenly when it came to pregnant women, it was treated differently.

Exactly. And if that's the case, in fact, then you lose, don't you? Well, I would like to address that because... And that seems to be part of the reason why in 2015 the court ruled 6-3 in favor of Peggy Young. And what exactly did the Supreme Court ruling say that UPS should have done in this case? It said that UPS should have given Peggy Young light duty. They should have found a job for her sitting down. They should have found a way to accommodate her request

because they were accommodating so many other kinds of workers at the time. I'm struck that the UPS case sounds very similar to the case of Otisha and Walmart, even down to the fact that they were both asking their employers to not have them lifting heavy boxes while they were pregnant. Yeah, it's true. You know, legally, they are very similar. But the way this played out for Otisha

was that she didn't know the law. She didn't have a lawyer at that point. She didn't know about Peggy Young's case. And frankly, her manager probably didn't either. And that's kind of the reality of working in America today. It's not as if, you know, laws don't exist protecting people. It's that on a day-to-day basis, when in this case you're pregnant, you need a job, you need the health care, the paycheck is the best one that you've gotten in a long time,

and someone tells you, no, you can't stop lifting these chickens, you're not going to challenge that person. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense for you at that point. You're vulnerable, you're pregnant, you're expecting another kid. And so on a practical level, you're at the whim of the people that you're looking at every day. And those people might not be lawyers. They may not have any sense of what their obligations are or what your rights are. And another thing that makes this complicated is that it's not as if Otish's managers came right out and said, we're firing you because you're pregnant and you're no longer useful or able to do your job. They said Walmart will no longer be needing

your services. And Walmart disputes that she ever asked for accommodations. So the point is, this can get squishy. This isn't always black and white. And when someone loses their job, like in Otisha's case, it's not always 100% clear that pregnancy is what did them in. Otisha, what happened when you left Walmart? I was unemployed for a year. I went through a struggle. Got in debt. Heck, I'm still in debt behind it, but it's okay.

I've slipped into a heavy, heavy, heavy depression. I was really, really in a dark place. I'm going to just put it to you that way. I don't want to go into details on that, but I was really down. I had a newborn, and then my newborn was diagnosed, you know, with a blood disorder. And it was so much stuff going on in and out of the hospital. And then I ended up getting a job the next year in January, paying way less than what I was getting paid at Walmart. Really?

Mm-hmm. I was getting paid almost $10 at Walmart, and the job that I started was like $8. What is your job now? Right now, I am a counteragent at a van rental company. Mm-hmm. I rent out vans. So, finally, I just want to know a little bit about your baby.

Her name is Jaya. She's full of excitement and joy. She likes to run, play at the park, be outdoors, swim in the pool. She likes to do activities. She likes to keep herself pool. She's more, she likes to do activities. She likes to keep herself active. She's a firecracker. Leticia, thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate it. No, thank you.

Thank you. On tomorrow's Daily, part two of the Times investigation finds a different, more subtle form of discrimination. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the Customs and Border Protection Agency said it had temporarily stopped handing over migrant families for criminal prosecution, effectively suspending President Trump's zero-tolerance policy.

The agency said it would no longer refer families to the Justice Department until it was assured that parents can be prosecuted without being separated from their children. The Times reports that because detention centers are filled to capacity, the immediate impact of the decision will be the release of many migrant families into the U.S. with a promise to return for a future court date,

a practice known as catch and release that the president has strongly criticized. And Thousands of illegal aliens are removed every month without seeing an immigration judge as a result of procedures in current law, including voluntary removal and expedited removal. Just because you don't see a judge doesn't mean you aren't receiving due process. At the White House,

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president's tweet that undocumented immigrants should be returned to their home countries without due process or an appearance before a judge. So what does that mean practically? Like, is the president planning to do anything differently or you're just saying, you know, the president's laid out what he'd like to see. We've put out the things that we want to see in an immigration package months ago. We're still waiting on Congress to give us the ability to do that. But under questioning by reporters, Sanders seemed to acknowledge that the president's tweet was unlikely to translate into meaningful policy changes. So unless Congress acts, nothing is actually going to change. The administration is not changing anything right now when it comes to justice.

You mean are we walking around making up laws? No, because we're not the Obama administration. We're actually trying to enforce the laws that are on the books. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.