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

Abstract

The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees' breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations' supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children's‐health lens that created morality‐driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.

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

“…When the pre-existing workplace structure or culture easily adapts to the law's dictates, organizations are more likely to create accommodations that directly ameliorate employees' situations in the ways envisioned by the authors of the relevant law. For example, organizations whose culture already allowed for flexible break times for all employees or who provided most employees with private offices easily implemented the Lactation at Work Law in effective ways (Hoffmann, 2021(Hoffmann, , 2022.…”