Floralba, a pregnant retail worker in the Bronx, was sent home on unpaid leave because she needed to temporarily avoid heavy lifting in order to prevent having another miscarriage. Last week, A Better Balance used the new law we championed, the NYC Pregnant Workers Fairness Act , to get Floralba back at work, with backpay, and to convince her employer to update it's policies in compliance with the law! This week, she has been pricing and hanging clothes instead of hauling heavy piles of clothes as she was required to do in the past. Thanks to this powerful new law, Floralba did not have to...

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has kicked up all sorts of controversy with her argument that career women can be their own worst enemy and should “lean in” more to their jobs and their ambitions. But the biggest, largely unspoken problem is not that she is elitist, or placing blame in the wrong place. It is that most women can’t rely on their work ethic or the good will of their boss to get ahead--- they need stronger legal protections to effectively “lean in.” It’s a vast, systemic issue. Women’s legal rights – at the moment of hiring, when they receive their paycheck,...

rue or False: 1) A pregnant woman can be fired for carrying a water bottle on the job to stay hydrated and prevent bladder infections. 2) A pregnant activity director at a nursing home can be terminated because she requires help with some physically strenuous aspects of her job to prevent having another miscarriage. 3) A pregnant delivery truck driver can be forced out on unpaid leave because she has a lifting restriction and needs light duty. The answer to all of these questions is true. These scenarios are based on actual cases, in which courts interpreted existing law to deny these...

Last week, Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a class action suit alleging that Bloomberg L.P. discriminated against pregnant women and mothers returning from maternity leave. In her decision , Judge Preska said that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) failed “to demonstrate that discrimination was Bloomberg’s standard operating procedure, even if there were several isolated instances of individual discrimination.” As reported in the New York Times , Judge Preska went on to write “The law does not mandate ‘work-life...