Pregnancy Discrimination

It is illegal for companies to fire, demote or deny a promotion to a woman for getting pregnant. Yet an increasing number of women say it is happening to them. Claims of pregnancy discrimination are at an all time high, making it one of the country's fastest growing types of employment discrimination, but women are fighting back -- and winning big.
For Kristine Buffone, playing with her 3-year-old son, Nicholas, brings great joy. But his arrival brought on the fight of her life.

"After I'd had Nicholas, when I started calling saying, you know, I'm ready to come back to work, I was told they didn't have room for me, that the position was filled," said Buffone.

Buffone had worked at Rosebud restaurant in Chicago's theatre district for nearly a decade, starting as a hostess and working her way up to management. Problems occurred when she took maternity leave.

"I didn't realize I was fired until I tried to go back to work," Buffone said. "I was told by them that I made a choice to have a family and that was my choice."

Buffone's next choice was to sue Rosebud restaurants -- which declined ABC7's request for an interview. The restaurant maintains Buffone quit, but in September of last year, a jury took her side.

"The jury came back with a verdict of $380,000. After the verdict, we filed a motion with the court under the Family Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, for liquidated damages. Essentially, it doubled her backpay so the court awarded her an additional $55,000," said Eugene Hollander, Buffone's attorney.

Add to that a judgment of $148,000 in attorneys fees for a total of $583,000.

Buffone is not the only one to win big recently. A class action suit of more than 12,000 women netted $48.9 million from Verizon Communications in 2002. Female workers say they were denied company service credit during the time they were out on maternity leave, which shortchanged their retirement benefits.

And the HMO Amerigroup is appealing a record $334 million penalty imposed after the company refused to provide coverage to women who wanted to sign up for insurance in the last three months of pregnancy.

John Hendrickson of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says, even though the pregnancy discrimination act has been in effect since 1978, he is not surprised the number of lawsuits filed has tripled since the late 1990s.

"We have a lot more women in the workplace than we used to. We have profound social change in terms of women expecting that they can both have children and keep their job, which of course is exactly what the law says they can do," said Hendrickson.

In fact, the law says pregnancy must be treated as any other short term disability. An employer must provide modified tasks or alternative assignments for a woman who temporarily can not perform her job. It also must hold open a job for a pregnancy-related absence.

For Buffone, the verdict brought victory, but more importantly vindication.

"I didn't get into this for the money. I got into this to prove a point," said Buffone.

Even though the number of claims of discrimination is up, attorneys say they are seeing only a fraction of what is out there. Many women still don't know their rights when it comes to pregnancy in the workplace, so employers get away with it.

source : abclocal.go.com