Our client, Bobbie Roth, has worked for Amtrak for 15 years. As we allege in a Charge of Discrimination we filed with the U.S. EEOC on Bobbie’s behalf in 2024, the transit company denied her the accommodations she needed to keep pumping breastmilk after giving birth to her daughter. Recently, the EEOC issued a letter finding reasonable cause to believe that Amtrak violated the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, among other laws, in their treatment of Bobbie.
Bobbie proposed working more limited routes to give her regular breaks between trips, or even temporary transfer to another position. She had seen Amtrak give these accommodations to other engineers before for reasons unrelated to pumping, and believed she should get them now so she could feed her child. She was ultimately denied these accommodations and left to fend for herself, and pumping became a daily struggle as she tried to secure shorter routes and find appropriate lactation spaces without support from Amtrak. As a result, Bobbie was forced to turn down long routes that would leave her no opportunity to pump, resulting in lost income.
Bobbie had been denied accommodations to pump on the job before, when her son was born in 2019. But in the time since then, several new federal laws were passed that provided important protections for nursing mothers – including the PUMP Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Our charge argues that Bobbie’s rights to accommodations to pump on the job were protected under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which covered employees like her at the time of her experience – and the EEOC’s letter is an important step toward vindicating those rights. The Charge of Discrimination has now entered “conciliation,” a process by which the EEOC attempts to negotiate a settlement of Bobbie’s claims while pushing for systemic change at Amtrak.
As a publicly-funded company, Amtrak has a higher mandate to follow federal law and provide accommodations to lactating employees, especially those in male-dominated roles in order to advance gender parity. We are pleased by the EEOC’s letter, and we call on Amtrak to reach a fair resolution on Bobbie’s charge, and to ensure that other employees in her shoes will have adequate breaks and a private pumping space so they do not have to choose between their career and feeding their child.