The California Fair Employment and Housing Act explicitly prohibits employers from harassing, demoting, terminating, or otherwise discriminating against any employee for becoming pregnant, or for requesting or taking pregnancy leave. The Act applies to all employers that regularly employed five (5) or more full-time employees in the preceding year.
If you are subjected to unlawful harassment or discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, you may be entitled to recover damages for emotional distress, lost wages, punitive damages and attorney’s fees.
In addition, the California Pregnancy Disability Leave Law ("PDLL") requires California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for employees actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions. This leave can be taken all at once or intermittently. It is important to note that California's PDLL requires California employers to provide up to four (4) months of leave for employees actually disabled by pregnancy or pregnancy-related conditions even if the employer's policies do not grant employees suffering from other short-term disabilities a similar amount of leave. In other words, unlike the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Law ("PDL"), California's PDLL requires that California employers give pregnant workers special, rather than simply equal treatment.
In California, once the employee has given birth she may be entitled to an additional 12-weeks of leave "for the reason of the birth of a child" under the California Family Rights Act ("CFRA"), which is California's version of the FMLA. Entitlement to CFRA leave for birth of a child depends on, 1) whether the employer employs more than 50 employees within a seventy five mile radius; and 2) Whether the employee worked more than 1250 hours in the 12 months preceding the first day of the requested CFRA leave or any pregnancy disability leave; and 3) Whether the employee has more than one year of service with the employer.
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Pregnancy discrimination continues to be a major problem in the workforce. Even the last year, thousands complaints about work-place pregnancy discrimination were filed all over the USA. It is safe to assume that at least that many workers, if not more, filed similar complaints with their state agencies. Those suffering from such condition and wondering about knowing more on various pregnancy discrimination laws will be glad to know that there are both state and federal statutes on the books that explicitly make such discrimination unlawful, namely the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) under California law and the amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under federal law.
ReplyDeletePregnant employees may have additional rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, which is enforced by the U.S. Department of Labor. Nursing mothers may also have the right to express milk in the workplace under a provision of the Fair Labor .
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