Supervisor to Pregnant Warehouse Worker: If You Can’t Handle the Lifting, Get an Abortion

A disturbing New York Times investigative story offers illustrates happens when the demands of the market conflict with the needs of families.

If you are a Verizon customer on the East Coast, odds are good that your cellphone or tablet arrived by way of a beige, windowless warehouse near Tennessee’s border with Mississippi. Inside, hundreds of workers, many of them women, lift and drag boxes weighing up to 45 pounds, filled with iPhones and other gadgets. There is no air-conditioning on the floor of the warehouse, which is owned and operated by a contractor. Temperatures there can rise past 100 degrees. Workers often faint, according to interviews with 20 current and former employees. One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans….

In Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Natalie Kitroeff tell the stories of several women working in physically demanding jobs who requested reassignment or accommodation during pregnancy, even with doctor’s notes, only to be ignored. Although they span different employers and industries, the Verizon warehouse operated by XPO logistics in Memphis was a repeat offender. Erica Hayes, Ceeadria Walker, and Tasha Murrell each lost children there.

Ms. Murrell said that she told her boss she was pregnant and asked to leave work early one day that spring because the lifting had become painful. Her supervisor told her to get an abortion, according to a discrimination complaint she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in April 2018. Ms. Murrell woke up the next morning to find her mattress stained with blood. Her husband drove her to the emergency room, where doctors told her she had miscarried.

The reporters note that every year lawmakers introduce a bill that would give pregnant women the same right to reasonable accommodation that the disabled receive  under the Americans with Disabilities Act – and that the proposal has never received so much as a hearing.

The story also reminds us why workers need unions, even in this day and age. The market doesn’t care one way or another about families. If the law will not shield families from the market’s harshest edges, workers must come together and bargain collectively to fight for themselves. This fact was not lost on the women of XPO logistics. As the story continues, “Ms. Murrell left the job last year and is now an organizer with the Teamsters, which is trying to organize a union at the warehouse.”

CLICK HERE to read Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.