The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is one of the progeny of Title VII of the Civil Rights act signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Initially it covered discrimination because of sex, race, color, creed and national origin. It has been expanded to include age, pregnancy, pay, religion, ancestry, genetic types and a number of other areas have been brought within its embrace.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) applies to employers with 15 or more employees, and is violated when expectant women are not hired, fired, or otherwise discriminated against due to pregnancy or intention to become pregnant. Employers may be likely to discriminate if they hold prejudices against working women and mothers and fear the productivity loss due to the absence of the employee. Sometimes employers are unable to find and use temporary employees, unable to afford overtime pay for other employees to fulfill the duties during leave, or fear the employee will require too many accommodations after her return. This is a delicate area, and an employer will do well to avoid the dire results of in this area. Here are just a few of the tens of hundreds of cases.
Cases:
* A boat captain fired while pregnant refused to abandon ship. she won $85,000 for emotional distress, repayment of all lost wages and the employer was fined $25,000. (Robert Ottinger, New York Employer blog, August, 2009)
* Jury awarded $720,000 in damages to an associate and a paralegal who claimed they were forced out of their New York law firm because of pregnancies. (Article posted in the ABA Law Journal August 22, 2008, by Debra Cassens Weiss)
* A Marin County Judge awarded $113,800 against filmmaker George Lucas for withdrawing a job offer to a San Francisco woman after she disclosed she was pregnant. (Article by Bog Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, July 01, 2010.
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