Allies Already Poised to Comply: How Social Proximity Affects Lactation at Work Law Compliance

Abstract

This study demonstrates how legal compliance may be better achieved when organizations include individuals who will advocate for newly codified rights and related accommodations. To understand compliance with a new law and the rights it confers, this article examines as its case study the Lactation at Work law, which amends the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate basic provisions for employees to express breast milk at work. In particular, this study interviewed those organizational actors who translate the law into the policies affecting workers' daily lives: supervising mangers and human resources personnel. Those studied in this article were “Allies Already:” friends or relatives of breastfeeding workers, or ones themselves, who held pro‐breastfeeding values and understood the complexities of combining lactation and employment. They mobilized within their organization to comply with the law swiftly and fully—often even overcomplying. This article demonstrates how heightened compliance, particularly with new laws, may be achieved even without directly affected actors mobilizing their own rights if allies champion needed accommodations.

Moralizing the law: Lactating workers and the transformation of supervising managers

“…This was when lactation accommodations complemented the culture or structure of that particular organization and so caused negligible disruption. Further discussion of this somewhat surprising finding regarding managerialization is outside the scope of this present article, but see (Hoffmann, 2019, 2021) for more discussion.…”

“…This article addresses a subset of the data: including only those HR specialists and supervising managers who had no personal or close second‐hand experience with pumping milk or nursing. Those with direct or near‐indirect experience are discussed fully and exclusively in another publication (Hoffmann, 2019). Because of their social proximity to the issues of breastfeeding and expressing milk at work, these were HR personnel and supervising managers who advocated for full lactation accommodation at, or even before, Time 1.…”

Opening the Gender Box: Legibility Dilemmas and Gender Data Collection on U.S. State Government Forms

“…Of course, the inertial capacities of formal decision-making processes can vary with the people involved. When internal actors are "allies already" or when decision makers are committed to change, other barriers to change may crumble (Hoffman 2019).…”

Law, compliance, and variation: Proximity and preferences regarding workplace lactation accommodations

“…The proximity of the private room is not dictated by the law, so some lactation-appropriate rooms may be closer to or farther from where the lactating employees are assigned to work. Similarly, the content of the rooms will vary-some may feature comfortable furniture, welcoming decorations, internet access, and computers, while other rooms may have none of these (Hoffmann, 2019(Hoffmann, , 2021Seijts, 2002).…”