Frontier Airline Pilots File Discrimination Claims Over Breastfeeding, Maternity Policies

Four female pilots have filed discrimination charges against Frontier Airlines, claiming that the company’s policies discriminate against women and new mothers.

The pilots assert that they were forced to take unpaid maternity leave before and after their pregnancies and that when they returned to work, they did not have proper accommodations for breastfeeding and pumping milk.

The complaints were filed Monday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The American Civil Liberties Union is assisting the women with their claims.

“This combination of limiting the amount of (unpaid) maternity leave we can take and not making accommodations for us to pump breast milk once we return to work puts new mothers in the heart-wrenching position of having to choose between our jobs and breastfeeding our children,” Shannon Kiedrowski, one of the pilots, wrote in an op-ed on the ACLU's website.

Here is what the pilots have said:

• They were forced to take unpaid maternity leave after 32 weeks of their pregnancy.
• Frontier did not offer reassignments after those 32 weeks so the women could keep working (and taking a paycheck) after they stop flying.
• Frontier offers a maximum 120 days of unpaid maternity leave after giving birth. The women were not allowed to take any more days off, even unpaid.
• When they returned to flying, they were unable to pump breast milk at regular intervals, as suggested by medical professionals.
• As a result, three of the four women developed mastitis, a breast tissue infection that develops when a woman goes long periods between breastfeeding.

The women say that Denver-based Frontier’s policies violate Colorado labor laws. Their list of requests include new Frontier policies for maternity leave, pumping in the lavatories on airplanes and temporarily changing work duties when new mothers are unable to fly long distances.

"Our policies and practices comply with all federal and state laws as well as with the relevant provisions of the collective bargaining agreement between Frontier and its pilots group," Frontier spokesman Jim Faulkner said in an emailed statement to Patch.

"While there are many work places that might allow for nursing mothers to express breast milk during a break from work activities, the duties of a commercial airline pilot present unique circumstances. We have made good-faith efforts to identity and provide rooms and other secure locations for use by breast-feeding pilots during their duty travel."

The ACLU says otherwise.

Galen Sherwin, an ACLU attorney, told Patch that, naturally, space on an airplane is limited, but there are still ways to accommodate nursing mothers.

For example, Sherwin said, Frontier could provide portable curtains to put up in a row of seats in between flights for a pilot to pump breast milk. At the very least, they should be allowed to do so in the lavatory, Sherwin said.

Frontier won't even allow that, the women allege.

Kiedrowski said in her claim that after she had her second child, a male pilot complained to Frontier that she was pumping breast milk one the aircraft. Kiedrowski told Frontier officials that she would “experience major health risks” if she suddenly stopped expressing breast milk, she claims, and her superiors at the company questioned why she wouldn’t feed her child formula instead.

Frontier told her she had to stop pumping breast milk during flights for safety reasons, Kiedrowski said, and the company told her she would not be paid a salary if she couldn’t fly.

Another pilot, Erin Zielinski, said that repeated requests for better breastfeeding and pumping accommodations went largely ignored by upper management.

Then one day, Zielinski said, she was inadvertently sent an email from Frontier’s senior labor relations manager, Michelle Zeier. In the email, Zeier told Frontier senior employee relations manager Chris Benedict that Zielinski was “still baiting us. No reply. She needs to come in for a meeting. No recordings/no games. Let’s chat tomorrow about it.”

“Frontier viewed my inquiries about nursing accommodations as nothing more than an attempt to “bait” them and did not appreciate that I was, in fact, trying to ensure that I would be able to pump adequate breast milk to feed my son and avoid serious medical complications for my own health,” Zielinski wrote in her complaint.

• You can read the women’s complaints in full here.

Image via Ron Vandulek