19th News
The PUMP Act, a bill designed to extend workplace protections to an additional 9 million nursing parents, went into full effect last week.
Now, workers will be able to sue their employers if they are not compliant with the law, which requires businesses to provide a private space that’s not a bathroom and adequate break time for workers to express breastmilk. The bill passed Congress with bipartisan support in December.
The PUMP Act will close loopholes and “unintentional” mistakes in a 2010 bill, the Break Time for Nursing Mothers Act, said Liz Morris, the deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law, which helped draft the model legislation the PUMP Act is based on. Previously, protections only extended to hourly workers who qualified for overtime, but even then, it restricted any restitution workers could seek. If workers wanted to sue their employer, there was no legal mechanism to do so. Now, the majority of those covered has expanded to also include salaried workers, such as teachers and nurses, most of whom are women.
About 83% of parents start out breastfeeding their children, but without a national paid parental leave policy, the most time many workers get is 12 weeks of unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act. As many parents go back to work, breastfeeding rates drop: By the time kids are 3 months old, 69% are breastfeeding, falling to 56% at 6 months, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the...
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