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Center defends rights of working families

Organizers can leverage 'WorkLife' laws

By Louise D. Walsh

Joan Williams

During a difficult pregnancy, Joan Williams slept two hours a day in her office. She could tape a do-not-disturb sign on her door, and just sleep, because she was a tenured law professor. “But if I’d had a 'real job,'" she realized, with the rigidity of most work environments, “I’d have been fired.”

"Motherhood is constructed to impoverish women and make them vulnerable. That shouldn't be!" she said in an interview with the Berger-Marks Foundation. Her own vulnerability awoke her to the injustices other mothers face and fueled her passion to build a team and create a new legal discipline: WorkLife Law. Berger-Marks is funding an arbitration database at the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

"We live in the worst public policy environment in the industrialized world for working mothers. Some of what happens to women, especially low income women, is blatantly illegal. One supervisor gave a worker a choice between having an abortion or being fired," Williams said. "Far too often, women who have no problems at work until they have children find they face discrimination after they become mothers.”

'Tag-team families' hard on fathers, too

As Williams probed deeper, she realized it's not just mothers who are vulnerable. So are many "tag-team families," where mom works one shift, and dad works a different shift, and each parent cares for the children while not at work. “Men who need to leave work for childcare reasons face even stronger discrimination than mothers do, which presents a real problem for tag-team families – for example, when a tag-team father is ordered to stay overtime, but can’t because he needs to go home so his wife can get to work.”

“Family responsibilities discrimination” (FRD) is employment discrimination against workers with family responsibilities. Pregnant women, mothers and fathers of young children, and employees with aging parents or sick spouses/partners may find themselves rejected for employment, demoted, harassed, passed over for promotion, or terminated – despite good performance evaluations – because of their family responsibilities.”

In Family Responsibility lawsuits, a good chance of winning

“Work/family conflicts vary by industry,” Williams pointed out. WorkLife Law, which runs a hotline for workers who encounter FRD, has had three separate reports of low-income workers who are given monthly “drug tests” that they suspect are in fact pregnancy tests, given that pregnant workers are fired shortly afterwards.

A 2006 report by WorkLife Law found that plaintiffs are more likely to win in FRD cases than in the general run of employment cases: FRD plaintiffs won nearly 50% of these cases.

Women face more discrimination as mothers

Photo by Susan Tindall, taken at Northeast Regional Summer School for Union Women

Documenting the vulnerability of mothers in the work force is now a field of study as the result of a Working Group that Williams ran in 2001-2003. "Mothers are 79 percent less likely to be hired and 100 percent less likely to be promoted. They are held to higher performance and punctuality standards," she said.

Mothers of every economic group hit the “maternal wall.” Unfortunately, most studies work/family conflict focus on female professionals, although “a growing literature exists on work/family conflicts among poor women,” said Williams. “The gaping hole is the lack of research on the middle class.”

Arbitrations: The untold story of work/family conflicts

That's one reason why WorkLife Law (WLL) seeks access to union arbitrations that involve work/family conflict. WLL already has studied all published arbitrations, as well as arbitrations from Amalgamated Transit Union, Communications Workers of America, Association of Flight Attendants, National Education Association, and United Mineworkers of America.

“We are trying hard to gain access to the arbitrations of other unions that have digitized their arbitration databases,” said Williams, “because they provide a vivid picture of the kinds of work/family conflicts that result in discipline and discharge of unionized workers.”

Arbitrations prove that unions can help parents

Photo by Susan Tindall, taken at Northeast Regional Summer School for Union Women

“The arbitrations also show us how to train workers to handle situations where they need to leave to care for children, elders and others, so that if a grievance does go to arbitration, they will not lose their jobs,” said Williams. “By studying the arbitrations, we know how to train workers to handle work/family conflicts to minimize their chances of being disciplined or discharged when they put family first,” she noted. If more unions open up their arbitration files, more wins for working parents can be found and other unions can use these victories to help workers.

The arbitration studies also are useful for organizing. “Arbitrations show very clearly that being a union member often helps workers with family responsibilities from being fired. An example is when a single-mom factory worker was fired after rushing to the emergency room to be with her child, who had suffered a head injury. Without her union, she would have been fired. Only because the union took her grievance to arbitration was she reinstated in her job by an arbitrator who said that her employer lacked just cause to fire her.”

Bottom line? Unionization is a big plus for workers with work/family conflicts, and FRD law can help protect workers who put family first. Clearly, union organizers need this information. You can help by showing your union this article and the Center's website. Ask them to share their arbitration files. You can , or call Manar Morales at 301-580-2490.