![]() But hopefully it’s about to become a lot rarer. First Watch was paying her $2.15 an hour, so two days, or roughly 13 hours, of work netted her about $7.60-total-plus tips.īetween the lack of accommodations, the lack of hours, and radio silence from a representative that First Watch told her would reach out about workers’ compensation, she felt she had no option but to quit and find a different job a few weeks later, she says. She already had two kids at home-a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old-and needed to save up for the new baby. By that point, her schedule had dwindled to two days a week. McClain returned to work the following weekend for her shift and was told by her manager that the restaurant was sufficiently staffed and she should go home. She ended up driving to Duke Regional Hospital and spent ten hours in the emergency room worrying about the fall’s impact on her pregnancy. Management told her to go to Urgent Care, but when she arrived, the facility didn’t have an ultrasound machine on hand, she says. “It felt like they wanted to fire me, but they couldn’t,” McClain says. But her break requests were denied, she says. ![]() ![]() For pregnancy accommodations, all she needed was a short mid-shift break to sit down and drink water, which would relieve her nausea. Serving at all is physically taxing-she had to be on her feet the whole time, table hopping and running hot platters of food-and brunch is widely viewed as the worst shift: customers are crabbier, dishes are more modifiable and thus more prone to error, and ticket printers run rapid-fire.īut McClain was happy to throw herself into the fray. Her shifts typically started around 7:30 a.m. ![]() “Even on weekends, when we would be packed with customers.” “They would say they had enough people on the floor,” McClain says. There were also a number of instances where she was told to go home right after clocking in for a shift. In the weeks after McClain disclosed her pregnancy to her manager, she says her schedule was cut from five days to four, and then to three. McClain, who quit her job at First Watch last month, has become intimately familiar with the latter approach.įirst Watch did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment. A more surreptitious strategy, though, is to keep a worker on the payroll while continuously rejecting their accommodation requests, effectively forcing them to quit. In some cases, an employer might use a worker’s accommodation as an excuse to fire them, arguing that they can no longer adequately perform their job. Specifically, gaps in the law have allowed employers to deny pregnant workers’ requests for simple, temporary accommodations such as water breaks or relief from lifting heavy objects. But in the decades since, the efficacy of the act’s protections has been overstated, according to Elizabeth Gedmark, vice president of the workers’ advocacy group A Better Balance and co-author of the book Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the Workplace.įor many low-wage workers-whose labor, Gedmark notes, is often made “invisible in our country”-the PDA’s stated protections have not translated from theory to practice. A shift toward a more equitable reality seemed possible. In 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) made it illegal for any company with 15 or more employees to consider pregnancy status while hiring, firing, and enumerating wages. ![]() The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox. ![]()
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