Privacy for employee
Jackson
18 Posts
Help! A newly incoming employee has informed me that, as a new mother, she is breast-feeding her newborn and needs a place at work to express breast milk twice each day. This employee is entitled to two 15 minute breaks each day, so the time away from her work station is already provided. My problem is in finding an appropriate location for her to accomplish this task. I think I remember reading somewhere that we are required to provide a certain type of area for this (In other words, a bathroom stall is not appropriate. After all, I guess we're talking about preparing food here.) Anyway, I don't recall if I read this as part of a law or what, and I can't find it again in any of my literature. Can anyone point me in a safe direction on this or remind me where this is covered? We're a financial institution. I don't want to put someone out of an office to accommodate her, but we're short on appropriate places to provide for her.
Comments
This discusses breastfeeding in general and in public and at work, as well as listing various state pending legislation in the last couple of years addressing breastfeeding, including at work.
If you have a first aid room, many companies will use that as the designated place allowing new mother's to lock the door when it's in use.
Margaret Morford
theHRedge
Christy Reeder
Website Managing Editor
[url]www.HRhero.com[/url]
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*Expressing breast milk at work*
Public Chapter No. 161 -- The Legislature tried its hand at helping working mothers with newborn children. Public Chapter No. 161 requires you to provide "reasonable unpaid break time each day to an employee who needs to express breast milk for her infant child."
Any questions? Well, to start with, does this mean that an employee can breast-feed her child at work? While that question isn't specifically addressed, it appears that the new law's intent is to permit an employee only to "express" breast milk for future use as opposed to actually nursing the child at work.
What about the break time? If, let's say, your employees have a 10-minute morning break and a 10-minute afternoon break, can an employee requesting the breast milk break be required to use the regular break time for that purpose? Yes, the law says the new break can run "concurrently with any break time already provided."
But what if expressing the breast milk takes longer than 10 minutes (and it probably will)? The employee would be allowed to continue the breast milk break beyond the regular 10-minute break.
Can the "extra" time be unpaid? Well, the new law says it can be -- but under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), you are ordinarily required to pay for any break that is shorter than 30 minutes. If the extra time takes 30 minutes or more, there should be no problem with treating it as an unpaid break. If it's less than 30 minutes, however, treating the time as unpaid could be problematic under the FLSA.
Are all employers required to provide this kind of break time? According to the new law, "employer" means any person or entity employing one or more employees. This statute, however, creates an exception if your business operations would be "unduly disrupted" by providing that kind of break time. The problem? The law does not define any of those terms, and it is difficult, therefore, to know precisely what would constitute an undue disruption of business operations.
And what about a place for expressing breast milk in the workplace? According to Public Chapter 161, reasonable efforts must be made to provide "a room at work" for that purpose -- "other than a toilet stall."
How many times per day must you allow an employee to take a break to express breast milk? The law says you must provide "reasonable unpaid break time" for that purpose. So again -- there is no concrete answer.
So what are you supposed to do? Bottom line: Be reasonable. When a request is made by an employee, try to accommodate it. It's probably a good idea for you to have a female representative of the company sit down with the employee to discuss the matter when the request is initially made. Find out how long the process ordinarily takes the employee and how often she will need the break time.
If you believe that allowing an employee to express breast milk will cause too much disruption at work or if it becomes too disruptive after you allow it, be sure to obtain legal advice before rejecting her request or stopping her break time.
The statute specifically says that you will not be held liable for a violation if a "reasonable effort has been made to comply" with the law. Since the law is designed to give added rights to working mothers and since not everyone will agree on what it means to be reasonable in that kind of situation, it is important that you be as flexible as possible in dealing with this new break time.
--John Phillips, Tennessee Employment Law Letter, June 1999
Copyright 2001 M. Lee Smith Publishers LLC