3 years after landmark law, some pregnant workers still don't get basic accommodations

Jennifer Hatch wanted a place to sit while she processed customers’ returns. She didn’t think it was a big ask.

Hatch had been working at an Amazon facility in Lancaster, New York, for a few months when she learned she was pregnant in January 2025. Working on her feet hadn’t been a problem before. But pregnancy exacerbated her asthma, making her breathless and lightheaded, and she developed unexplained abdominal pain that grew worse when she stood.

When her doctor completed paperwork advising that she sit periodically, Amazon requested additional documentation and then said it had not received it, according to a complaint Hatch, 46, filed with a federal agency. Weeks passed. Once, struggling to breathe, she found a chair and sat while continuing to work. She felt better -- until, her complaint said, a manager told her to stand.

In February and March 2025, Hatch repeatedly left work in an ambulance with severe abdominal pain. In late March, she arrived for a shift and found out she had been fired.

Her hospital visits, according to her complaint, had taken her over her allowable absence time by 90 minutes.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect in June 2023, gave workers a right to reasonable accommodations related to pregnancy. Since then, women across the country have benefited from a new legal tool to get the changes they need in their jobs. But recent legal challenges underscore how often companies continue to deny accommodation requests, causing some women to develop preventable health complications or forcing them into unpaid leave or unemployment, according to groups that support pregnant workers. Many of these women are in low-wage jobs in retail and manufacturing.

Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said a pregnant woman might need accommodations for a number of reasons. He noted that fall risk increases during pregnancy as the body’s center of gravity shifts, and changes to the abdominal muscles and hormonal effects on joints can increase the risk of injuries.

In general, said Dr. Alison G. Cahill, president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, “any time accommodations are not made that are medically necessary, that is putting somebody at risk.”

Last year, a hotline run by A Better Balance, a legal advocacy group that helped lead the effort to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and represents Hatch, fielded calls from 765 pregnant employees who said they had been denied accommodations such as chairs, breaks and time off for prenatal appointments without penalty, according to its president, Inimai Chettiar. Of the callers, 43 worked for Amazon.

The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, San Francisco, has also received calls from hundreds of women, including Amazon employees, since the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act took effect, its co-director, Liz Morris, said.

The companies represented in hotline calls are not necessarily the companies that deny the most requests. Public awareness is also a factor, Chettiar noted: A Better Balance began receiving more calls from Amazon employees after it filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the company’s accommodation practices.

However, Amazon has drawn criticism for its treatment of employees, particularly its use of algorithms to measure performance and mete out discipline.

Current and former Amazon employees said that even when the company approved extra breaks during pregnancy, those breaks were deducted from their unpaid time allowance, moving them toward a threshold where they would be fired.

Kristina Green, 30, whose job at a Rochester, New York, warehouse involves lifting heavy objects and climbing ladders, said that happened to her in 2024, and that she was denied accommodations for another pregnancy after being rehired in 2025.

Green has high blood pressure, which pregnancy exacerbated. Amazon denied her requests to sit or transfer to a less strenuous job, according to a complaint A Better Balance filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

A manager said she could take more breaks, but Green, worried that she would be penalized anyway, said she sometimes kept working even when she felt dizzy, overheated and faint. The intensity of her work also worsened pregnancy-related back, ligament and nerve pain, her complaint said.

In response to detailed questions about Green’s, Hatch’s and a third woman’s experiences, an Amazon spokesperson said the company had approved more than 99.9% of pregnancy-related accommodation requests in the past year, adding, “We take every team member’s situation seriously, and when we find that we got something incorrect, we work hard to make it right.”

She said the complaints “contain inaccuracies and omit important details,” but she did not provide specifics, saying Amazon could not comment on individual employees’ situations.

Under the EEOC’s rules for applying the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, certain common requests -- including sitting and taking additional eating, drinking or bathroom breaks -- should “almost invariably” be provided with little delay or demands for documentation, said Joseph J. Lynett, a co-leader of the Leave and Accommodation practice group at Jackson Lewis, a law firm that represents employers.

Other requests, such as moving temporarily to a different role, can be subject to more negotiations, he said. Employers can deny a request that would cause “significant operational difficulty” or expense. (Jackson Lewis has worked with Amazon, but Lynett spoke generally about the act’s requirements.)

This February, the EEOC found “reasonable cause to believe” that Amazon had systemically violated the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The finding was in response to Hatch’s complaint, but the commission said the evidence suggested discrimination against “a nationwide class of female warehouse associates.”

The EEOC will now try to reach an agreement with Amazon. If it can’t, Hatch will have the option of suing.

A Better Balance has also alleged systemic violations at Speedway, the gas station and convenience store chain.

Arya Parks, 27, was several months pregnant when she started working at Speedway in October 2023.

At first, her manager let her sit on milk crates while working behind the counter and use a grabbing tool to reach high shelves without a ladder, and allowed a 15-minute break every four hours, according to an EEOC complaint that A Better Balance filed on her behalf. But when that manager left, the complaint says, her replacement took the crates away and said she couldn’t use the tool.

On Dec. 1, 2023, Parks had a medical emergency related to her pregnancy, her complaint says. She recovered, but her doctor told her not to work for several days. After that, according to the complaint, Speedway put her on involuntary unpaid leave, saying it couldn’t accommodate her. Since it didn’t fire her, it contested her unemployment application, she said -- meaning she couldn’t get unemployment payments.

“I begged to keep working,” Parks said. “It hurt to think that I wasn’t going to be able to provide for my kids.”

She was out of work for months. The EEOC has not yet reached a conclusion on her complaint.

7-Eleven, which owns Speedway, did not respond to requests for comment.

Nine times out of 10, Morris said, her staff at the Center for WorkLife Law can help hotline callers get accommodations. But the volume of women struggling to get accommodations means that even 1 in 10 adds up. In addition to EEOC complaints, lawyers are steadily filing lawsuits on behalf of pregnant women, Morris noted.

Several women interviewed for this article emphasized how small their requests had been.

After Amazon fired Hatch, she increased her hours at a gas station where she had been working part time. The gas station, she said, provided what Amazon wouldn’t.

“As soon as I asked for an accommodation to be able to sit down, the next shift I went in, there was a chair already behind the register for me,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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