A Pregnant UPS Worker Forced Into Unpaid Leave Goes to the Supreme Court - Businessweek
If you’re a woman with a physically demanding job and you get pregnant, should your employer make accommodations so you can continue to do your job? What if they already make accommodations for employees who are injured or disabled? Is there a law that says not doing so is illegal? These issues are at the heart of a U.S. Supreme Court case that will be heard on Wednesday, Dec. 3. It involves United Parcel Service (UPS) and a former delivery driver named Peggy Young.
UPS’s gender-neutral policy covers employees who are injured on the job, disabled under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), or have lost driving certification. Unfortunately for Young, the ADA doesn’t consider pregnancy a disability. Because of this, Young has lost in lower courts. The U.S. Court of Appeals pointed out (PDF) that a father who injured his back picking up his child wouldn’t be offered light duty and said that to force UPS to offer pregnant women a special arrangement would “imbue the PDA with a preferential treatment mandate that Congress neither intended nor enacted. … the UPS policy at issue is not direct evidence of pregnancy-based sex discrimination.”
That’s certainly one way to look at it. An alternate way is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws practices that unintentionally discriminate against someone based on their gender (or race, national origin, or religion). Since only women can become pregnant, it could be argued that the UPS policy unintentionally fails to cover women in a way that it will never fail to cover men.
If you’re a woman with a physically demanding job and you get pregnant, should your employer make accommodations so you can continue to do your job? What if they already make accommodations for employees who are injured or disabled? Is there a law that says not doing so is illegal? These issues are at the heart of a U.S. Supreme Court case that will be heard on Wednesday, Dec. 3. It involves United Parcel Service (UPS) and a former delivery driver named Peggy Young.
UPS’s gender-neutral policy covers employees who are injured on the job, disabled under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), or have lost driving certification. Unfortunately for Young, the ADA doesn’t consider pregnancy a disability. Because of this, Young has lost in lower courts. The U.S. Court of Appeals pointed out (PDF) that a father who injured his back picking up his child wouldn’t be offered light duty and said that to force UPS to offer pregnant women a special arrangement would “imbue the PDA with a preferential treatment mandate that Congress neither intended nor enacted. … the UPS policy at issue is not direct evidence of pregnancy-based sex discrimination.”
That’s certainly one way to look at it. An alternate way is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws practices that unintentionally discriminate against someone based on their gender (or race, national origin, or religion). Since only women can become pregnant, it could be argued that the UPS policy unintentionally fails to cover women in a way that it will never fail to cover men.
