Frontier attendants say they couldn’t breast-feed on the job
DENVER — A year after four pilots accused Frontier Airlines of not doing enough to help pregnant or nursing employees, two flight attendants on Tuesday filed similar discrimination complaints Tuesday accusing the Denverbased discount carrier of forbidding them from pumping breast milk while on flights.
In documents filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, flight attendants Jo Roby of Boise, Idaho, and Stacy Rewitzer of Denver said they were forced to take unpaid leave after having their children so they could keep providing them with breast milk.
Both women said they returned to work within about four months after giving birth because Frontier does not offer parental leave and instead requires employees to cobble together sick or vacation days, Family Medical Leave Act time or medical leave subject to company approval to care for their babies.
They also said they were penalized because they had to use sick days to take time off during their pregnancies and to care for their children under the airline’s dependability policy that deducts points from employees for absences, putting them at greater risk of losing their job.
“As a result of Frontier’s actions, I have had to choose between performing my job and earning a living on the one hand, and continuing to breastfeed my child on the other,” Roby said in her complaint, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Holwell Shuster & Goldberg law firm.
Frontier responded that its policies comply with state and federal laws and the flight attendants’ union contract.
“We have made good-faith efforts to identity and provide rooms and other secure locations for use by breastfeeding flight attendants during their duty travel,” it said in a statement.
Roby and Rewitzer acknowledge that Frontier did try to provide locations for them to pump in airports but said they were not always close enough to gates to allow them to pump milk between flights so they could make it to back to planes in time to work.