Peggy Young worked as a driver for United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) when she got pregnant. Her doctor told her she shouldn’t lift anything weighing more than 20 pounds for the first 20 weeks of her pregnancy and nothing more than 10 pounds after that. Given that her job entailed heaving heavy packages, she informed her supervisor.
At which points she was told not to come back to work.
That would appear to clearly go against the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) which outlaws firing someone for being pregnant — along with reducing pay or anything else that could be seen as a penalty.
However, UPS argued that Young wasn’t being fired for being pregnant; she simply couldn’t do her job.
A trial court agreed with the company and initially dismissed Young’s lawsuit. She appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court.
The problem for UPS is the fact that they offer light-duty assignments to other employees who are injured on the job or who are disabled. Those individuals are often covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). UPS also offers such assignments to drivers who were in accidents or who had lost their licenses.
Why couldn’t a pregnant woman be given one of those positions?
While the ADA is fairly clear about what employers must do to accommodate disabled employees, the PDA is considerably less so. It’s a loophole UPS is attempting to exploit.
That elicited some exasperation from some of the justices.
“It was supposed to be about ensuring that they wouldn’t be unfairly excluded from the workplace,” Justice Elena Kagan said to the lawyer representing UPS. “And what you are saying is that there’s a policy that accommodates some workers, but puts all pregnant women on one side of the line.”
The federal government also weighed in, saying that the original law did intend to give the same protections to pregnant women.
“The point of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is to reduce the number of women who are driven from the work force or forced to go months without an income as a result of becoming pregnant,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the court.
UPS’s response has been that it simply followed the law as written.
