New report documents how low-wage workers are discriminated against at work based on their caregiving responsibilities at home

A new report by U.C. Hastings’ Center for WorkLife Law details the extreme measures to which low-wage workers must go to keep a job and care for their children or elderly family members—and the sometimes shocking discrimination they face at work despite these efforts.

The first of its kind to analyze caregiver discrimination lawsuits filed by low-wage workers, the report—Poor, Pregnant, and Fired: Caregiver Discrimination Against Low-Wage Workers—exposes mistreatment at work around caregiving responsibilities.  The powerful cases profiled in the report, which attracted the attention of the National Law Journal, include:

• employees encouraged to get abortions or asked about their birth control usage, or sexually harassed because of their roles as caregivers;
• pregnant workers fired on the spot or immediately after announcing their pregnancies, or banned from certain positions no matter what their individual capabilities;
• workers routinely denied access to their legal rights, especially to family and medical leave;
• employees being set up to fail, with unreasonable goals or tasks assigned to them, after caregiving responsibilities are discovered;
• low-wage men who care for children or elderly parents subjected to extreme gender stereotyping at work; and
• pregnant women of color denied access to accommodations regularly granted to their pregnant co-workers of a different race.

Even in family emergencies, the report shows, low-wage workers are refused the small kinds of workplace flexibility that are commonplace for middle-wage and professional workers.  One retail worker whose case is profiled in the report was fired for insubordination for carrying a water bottle at work—despite a doctor’s note recommending she do so to treat recurring urinary and bladder infections due to her pregnancy.

Ironically, small changes by employers can make a significant difference in keeping experienced employees in their jobs.  They can also prevent costly liability: several lawsuits profiled resulted in large verdicts, including four with recoveries of between $2.3 and $11.65 million, despite the plaintiffs’ (a housekeeper, a shipping dispatcher, a bakery delivery driver, and a hospital maintenance worker) low wages.

“Caregiver discrimination lawsuits brought by low-wage workers document clearly that work-family conflict is not just a professional women’s problem.  In fact, it’s most acute and extreme for low-income families,” said study author Stephanie Bornstein, Deputy Director of the Center for WorkLife Law.  “To help families move out of poverty, we can’t just focus on ‘fixing’ the worker.  We also need to look at how caregiver discrimination in low-wage jobs undercuts economic stability.  Discrimination not only hurts workers and their families; it leads to high turnover and legal liability for employers.”

Another case profiled in the report is that of a pregnant woman who was forced out of her retail sector job onto unpaid leave despite her desire to work as long as possible while pregnant.  Her supervisor had allowed her perform all of her job tasks while avoiding heavy lifting, and she was working successfully.  Yet several weeks later, when her doctor sent a letter to the company’s HR office to cement this arrangement, she was immediately sent home and told that she could not be accommodated—in violation of California law.

A soon-to-be single mother, the woman was “trying to do the best she could for her baby,” and was confused as to why she was being sent home when she wanted to work, said Jamie Dolkas, Staff Attorney at Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco, who represents the woman.  “As a low-wage worker, she was really disenfranchised….[T]hey didn’t take the time to explain to her what her rights or options were—they just gave her something in writing that essentially said we can’t accommodate you, go home,” explained Dolkas.

The report profiles 50 cases—selected from among hundreds identified by Center for WorkLife Law research—of low-wage workers who experienced discrimination at work based on their efforts to be both a good worker and a good parent or family member.

The Center for WorkLife Law is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that works with employees, employers, attorneys, unions, and policymakers to fuel social and organizational change around work-life issues.  The Center is part of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

About the Author: Stephanie Bornstein is an employment attorney and Deputy Director of WLL. Prior to joining WLL, she worked as a staff attorney at Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a public interest law center focused on gender discrimination in employment and education. At ERA, Bornstein represented plaintiffs in individual and class action employment matters, specializing in pregnancy discrimination and family and medical leave. She was also among a small group of advocates to help author and enact California’s Paid Family Leave insurance program, the nation’s first comprehensive paid leave law. In addition, Bornstein worked as a legal editor of employment law products at Nolo Press, a leading publisher of legal books for non-lawyers.

For the last few months I’ve been thinking about and writing about home care workers. In my work, I find that if folks haven’t had to hire a homecare worker for themselves or their family, it appears that most of these workers fall off the radar.

The problem here is somewhat circular. The demand for homecare services is exploding as the baby boomer generation ages and more seniors and people with disabilities choose to live at home rather than in a nursing home. Low wages, no federal minimum wage or overtime protections, and no benefits contribute to homecare workers leaving their profession (turnover is estimated to be as high as 60% per year). Consumers and patients have difficulty finding and keeping homecare services as a result. Which leads to – yes – increasing demand for homecare workers.

How did this happen?

Well, it goes all the way back to 1938 when the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was enacted to ensure a minimum standard of living for workers through the provision of minimum wage, overtime pay, and other protections – but domestic workers, for some reason, were excluded.

Then 36 years later, in 1974, the FLSA was amended to include domestic employees, such as housekeepers, full-time nannies, chauffeurs, and cleaners. However, people who were described as “companions to the elderly or infirm” were for some reason excluded from the law. They were compared to “babysitters.” Weird, huh?

The following year, in 1975, the Department of Labor (DOL) goes on to interpret this “companionship exemption” as including all direct-care workers in the home, even homecare workers employed by third parties, such as home care agencies.

So, in 2001, the Clinton DOL finds that “significant changes in the home care industry” have occurred and issues a “notice of proposed rulemaking” that would have made important changes to this weird exemption. They agreed that it made no sense to exclude this whole industry, as if they were just like “babysitters.”

Clinton’s findings were unfortunately short-lived because the incoming Bush Administration terminated the revision process. Thank you, Mr. Bush.

In 2007 something else happened worth noting: The US Supreme Court, in a case brought by New York home care attendant Evelyn Coke, upheld the DOL’s authority to define this exception to the FLSA. This means, this crazy archaic law can easily be reversed by the DOL.

Meanwhile more than 1.5 million homecare workers are currently living at near poverty level earning a median income of $17,000 a year. Most of these workers, who both love their work and are good at their work, must have two and three jobs to just make ends meet. Many of these workers need food stamps to put food on their tables. All this ultimately comes back to the consumer who often finds it difficult to find and retain high quality homecare services.

The injustice here is, as was said in a June 6 NY Times Op-Ed, ” …while nannies and caregivers make it possible for professional couples to balance the demands of family and work, they often cannot take time to be with their own families when sickness or injury strikes.”

Though I inherently know that we can fix this problem together, I am keen to know what you think is the best way to make this happen.

This article originally appeared on the SEIU Blog.

About the Author: Richard Negri is the founder of UnionReview.com and is the Online Manager for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Finding a manageable work/life balance is something many of us struggle with a great deal–and the stakes only get higher for Americans who work full-time and have caregiving responsibilities at home. Whether that means taking care of children, a sick partner, or an elderly loved one, holding down an ambitious career while still taking good care of those that depend on you at home can be a daunting challenge.

While I’d like to be able to tell you that employers are universally understanding of their employees that struggle with juggling a full-time job while being a caregiver, we all know this simply isn’t true. As if layoffs due to our ailing economy weren’t bad enough, employers discriminating against employees based on their caregiving responsibilities is on the rise–and it has a name: Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD).

Before you stop reading this post because you’re thinking “such a wonky-sounding term can’t possibly affect me,” I beg you to take another few moments and keep on reading. Family Responsibilities Discrimination can occur in any number of unfortunate–but very real–workplace circumstances. Such as….

• when a new mother is denied a promotion NOT based on her job performance, but because it is assumed she will no longer be as committed to work once baby enters the picture.
• when a man’s employer refuses him paternity leave because “his wife should do it”
• when a worker is fired for not meeting work goals while he is on legally protected family and medical leave to take care of a sick parent.

A new report by the Center for WorkLife Law’s Stephanie Bornstein & Robert J. Rathmell provides us with information about additional worker protections under local laws about which most people are not aware–like the ones described above. Take this true situation cited in the report, for example:

In Chicago, a single mother of two who filed a complaint for parental status discrimination under the city’s local ordinance was recently awarded over $300,000 in damages. The woman had been fired from her job as a medical services salesperson after rescheduling a meeting because her daughter was ill.

The report finds that while no federal law and only a few state laws expressly prohibit discrimination against working caregivers, at least 63 local governments in 22 states do. The findings also demonstrate that while the scope of local laws may seem limited, their impact can be pretty significant.

Working caregivers shouldn’t end up unemployed because of their responsibilities at home–but the fact is that they sometimes do. While we may not be able to legislate employer attitudes, we can take responsibility for knowing our rights. Read the report here: “Entitled Caregivers as a Protected Class?: The Growth of State and Local Laws Prohibiting Family Responsibilities Discrimination.”

For more information about each local law collected in the survey, visit www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/LocalFRDLawsDetail.html.

Additional findings of the report can be found after the break.