Know Your Rights: Pregnant and Lactating Workers in Pennsylvania

Equal Treatment

Your employer cannot refuse to hire you, fire you, or otherwise discriminate against you because you are pregnant.

Your employer must treat you the way it treats non‐pregnant employees.

Reasonable Accommodations

In many cases, you have a right to a workplace accommodation for a pregnancy-related condition, even if the condition is not a disability, so long as the accommodation does not impose an undue hardship on your employer.

Leave of Absence

Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, covered employers are required to give eligible employees twelve weeks of unpaid medical leave. Education employers may be required to provide you with a reasonable amount of unpaid leave for pregnancy- or childbirth-related reasons.

Most Philadelphia and Pittsburgh employers must allow you to accrue 1 hour of paid sick leave each work week (up to 24 or 40 hours of sick leave per year). Philadelphia employers with less than 10 employees can provide sick leave that is unpaid.

The Right to Ask for Your Rights

If you ask for your rights or complain that your rights have been violated, your employer cannot respond by taking action against you

Equal Treatment

An employer cannot refuse to hire you, fire you, or otherwise discriminate against you because you are lactating, breastfeeding, or producing breast milk.

Your employer must treat you the way it treats other employees

Break Time to Express Milk and a Private Space that Is Not a Bathroom

In most cases, unless it would be an undue hardship, your employer must provide you with:

(1) paid or unpaid break time to express milk, and

(2) a private space, other than a bathroom, for you to express milk.