Hi OOW members! We’re excited to share news about Elizabeth Hoffmann‘s book, Lactation at Work: Expressed Milk, Expressing Beliefs, and the Expressive Value of Law!

SUMMARY:

In recent decades, as women entered the US workforce in increasing numbers, they faced the conundrum of how to maintain breastfeeding and hold down full-time jobs. In 2010, the Lactation at Work Law (an amendment to the US Fair Labor Standards Act) mandated accommodations for lactating women. This book examines the federal law and its state-level equivalent in Indiana, drawing on two waves of interviews with human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating workers. In many ways, this simple law – requiring break time and privacy for pumping – is a success story. Through advocacy by allies, education of managers, and employee initiative, many organizations created compliant accommodations. This book shows legal scholars how a successful civil rights law creates effective change; helps labor activists and management personnel understand how to approach new accommodations; and enables workers to understand the possibilities for amelioration of workplace problems through internal negotiations and legal reforms.

• Utilizes data from three sets of organizational actors: human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating employees, in order to observe the application of law into policy, and policy into day-to-day work experiences from three different perspectives
• Draws on two-waves of data, one from immediately after the law was passed in real-time and another about 5 years later
• Engages both organizational theory and law and society scholarship to demonstrate a key intersection of two important scholarly areas to help understand how a law’s application evolves within organizations