Breast-Feeding Becomes Workplace Issue : Business: Advocates say working mothers need a sanitary place to pump milk for later use.
In an office bathroom, amid the sounds of toilets flushing, a new mother pumps milk from her breasts into bottles that will later be fed to her newborn child.
At another company across town, a mother hides in a supply closet filling plastic sandwich bags with her milk, and praying that none of her co-workers will need a pencil or pen.
Such unpleasant scenes, say women’s advocates, are becoming more common with the growing presence of women in the workplace.
With more than 67% of all women of child-bearing age in the labor force--according to a 1989 medical study--some women’s advocates predict that the issue may soon emerge from the shadows of bathroom stalls and supply closets, to become a part of the national discussion on the needs of working mothers and families in general.
The 1989 study, which appeared in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, also noted that in the mid-1980s more than 40% of women with infants 1 year old or younger worked full or part time.
What the advocates want is for employers to give women the time and privacy to use breast pumps that allow them to store their milk for later.
Some experts and new mothers say the need for safe, clean places for women to pump milk is almost as important to some working women as more commonly discussed issues such as family leave and flex time.
“If you think about it, would you go and prepare your own lunch in a toilet stall?” asked Rona Cohen, an assistant clinical professor of maternal child health at UCLA’s School of Nursing. “We wouldn’t do that, but yet we’re preparing our baby’s food in toilet stalls.
“It’s really been difficult for women. I know of women who have been threatened that if they do this activity on the work-site they will be fired . . . yet, breast-feeding makes good business sense.”
Nell Merlino of the New York-based Ms. Foundation for Women agrees. “As industries start to reorganize one of the things they are examining is how to integrate work and family better,” she said. “They have become places that are very separate from the rest of our lives and women are forced to try and change that because they have so much responsibility.”
In some places, change has already started to occur. For the past five years the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has offered employees a lactation program complete with classes, 24-hour counselors, a pump for each mother and a lactation room. This year, Burbank implemented the same program for its employees, including an officer from the Police Department.
“It’s an idea whose time has come,” said John K. Nicoll, Burbank’s management services director. “Once organizations try it, it will be as common as the existence of sick leave and medical plans.”
Women’s advocates and others say it is difficult to know just how widespread the problems for breast-feeding working mothers really are. Many women simply stop breast-feeding when they return to work, anticipating the difficulties that may arise. Others continue but never make their needs known to their supervisors.
“Women are very worried about walking into a workplace and having to identify their needs as women,” said Abby Leibman, executive director of the California Women’s Law Center. “There are so many employers who don’t even want to accommodate the fact that women are going to have babies.”
Women now make up 46% of the American work-force. According to the U.S. Labor Department, they will account for 62% of the net gain in workers between 1990 and 2005 and three-fourths will become pregnant during their working lives.
“There are some conclusions that one can draw,” Leibman said. “That there are increasing numbers of mothers in the workplace, that mothers are certainly going to be faced with an option of breast-feeding and bottle-feeding and that there is going to be an increasing number of women choosing to breast-feed.”
In 1991--the last date for which figures are available, 53.3% of all infants in the United States were being breast-fed when they left the hospital, a number that remained mostly constant throughout the 1980s, according to La Leche League International, a nonprofit organization that promotes and supports breast-feeding.
After the 1940s, the numbers of breast-feeding numbers declined significantly, as more women began turning to formula. In 1971, the percent of mothers breast-feeding when discharged from the hospital hit a low of 24.7%. By 1982, the number rose to a high of 61.9%.
Studies show that babies who are breast-fed are less likely to become ill than those on formula, and breast-feeding offers health benefits to the mother as well. Healthy People 2000, a master plan for increasing the nation’s health issued in 1990 by Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, lists increasing breast-feeding as one of the 298 goals the nation should strive for to reach better health.
Businesses have been slow, however, to make accommodations for working women who choose to breast-feed.
“I find people are embarrassed by the topic,” Cohen said. “You don’t use the B word in business.”
Aside from having trouble finding a place to pump, mothers may also encounter supervisors who refuse to allow them to rearrange break times in order to stay on a pumping schedule, Cohen said.
That’s exactly what Teresa Riegel of Detroit encountered when she attempted to return to her job at Chrysler Corp. after taking maternity leave.
The day before her scheduled return to work last November, Riegel met with members of Chrysler’s human resources department, said her attorney Ralph Sirlin. She explained that she would need to pump during the day and asked if she could extend two of her breaks by 12 to 16 minutes each and make the time up at some other point during the day.
But Sirlin said company officials refused her request. Instead, they offered other suggestions.
“They would say things like, ‘Why don’t you pump your breasts before you come to work and then you can pump them after you leave?’ ” Sirlin said. “They don’t understand the whole idea of breast-feeding. They can’t expect this woman to hold the milk for nine hours. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Riegel, who has been off work since November has sued the corporation, seeking about $15,000 in back wages and compensation for the “humiliation and embarrassment.”
K.C. Hortop, an attorney representing Chrysler declined to comment on the case while it is in court.
For Judie Sarquiz and Robin Torrellas of Burbank, the path has been much easier.
Both women participate in the city’s free, lactation program designed and operated by Sanvita, a division of Medela Inc., a McHenry, Ill.-based company that manufactures breast pumps.
“I think it’s fantastic that they care enough about me and what is dearest to my heart--my child,” Sarquiz said. “They are supporting us and saying, ‘you matter to us.’ ”
Under the Sanvita Corporate Lactation Program, expectant mothers and their mates attend classes on breast-feeding. Each woman is given her own pump and assigned a counselor who gives guidance and support, particularly right after the baby’s birth, when families may begin questioning their decision to breast-feed.
“Families are at a vulnerable time in their lives,” said Cohen, who developed and oversees the Sanvita program. “It’s very important for them to have someone who can safely and knowledgeably provide them the information they need and be there for them.”
As a lactation consultant for the Burbank program, Joan Ortiz fills a role that in the past--when breast-feeding was more common--may have been played by mothers or aunts.
As a registered nurse and a mother who breast-fed her children, Ortiz knows that a mother may panic when she thinks her baby is not getting enough milk, or when the child has difficulty latching onto her breast. She also knows that the stigma attached to breast-feeding, and the difficulty some women encounter at work, may cause them to give up breast-feeding.
“A working mother has so much on her mind,” Ortiz said. “She wants to be productive in her job, she wants to be a good mother and meet the needs of her baby and still be a good wife. She’s really faced with a lot of roles she has to play.”
Twice a day for about 10 minutes, Sarquiz and Torrellas leave their desks in the city’s Finance Department and head down to the basement floor to the new lactation room. The setting is decidedly homey--the room is softly lit and the walls covered with photographs of women and their children. There is a sofa, a dresser with a mirror and plants.
“It’s relaxed in here,” Torrellas said sitting on the sofa. “It’s like a little sanctuary.”
Both women say their children are healthy and they attribute their good health to breast-feeding.
“I’ve only had to stay out one day” to care for her daughter, Sarquiz said.
That, said Patricia A. Olowiany, a registered dietitian and Certified Lactation Educator, should convince any company head of the merits of supporting workers who choose to breast-feed.
“What benefits the baby benefits the mother and ultimately the company,” said Olowiany, who markets the program for Sanvita.
Mothers with healthy babies tend to miss work less, Olowiany said. Programs, like the lactation program, that support mothers help increase company moral, resulting in less turn-over. Healthy babies also can reduce health-care costs for companies and employees.
And lactation programs are not for women only. At the DWP, where the work force is about 77% male, the Sanvita “lactation program is one of the most utilized in the company,” said Kimberlee Vandenakker, a DWP, work family specialist.
“Part of the lactation program is education, how to nurse properly,” Vandenakker said. “We coach the male employees how to be supportive in the nursing process.”
The program is open to female relatives of employees.
At its two main offices in Los Angeles and Sun Valley, the DWP has set up lactation rooms. Partitions have been set up in smaller offices so workers can still pump.
“They’re overjoyed,” Vandenakker said. “They can’t believe it. HMOs are just not giving the services they need to give as far as nursing.”
For John Nicoll, the Burbank city official, the decision to offer the program was an easy one to make. At least 50% of his department is made up of women.
“I couldn’t afford the price of having Robin and Judie stay home,” Nicoll said. “These are women who have tough jobs . . . It’s appropriate and humane and ultimately it makes good business sense.”
