Pregnant Dockworkers in L.A. and Long Beach Need Better Workplace Protection

A truck drives past shipping containers stacked on rail cars at the Port of Long Beach on Dec. 4, 2024 in Long Beach, Calif. Women dockworkers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are suing for their rights to pregnancy and lactation accommodations. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)

Post-Dobbs, the fight for abortion access has rightly dominated headlines. While that’s a fight that’s still being waged, reproductive justice comprises many facets, including the right to healthy, dignified working conditions for those who choose to continue their pregnancies. Even in states with strong protections, like California, the fight is far from over to ensure pregnant workers don’t lose their livelihoods simply for starting a family.

The nation’s two biggest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, are the entry point for nearly half of all imports to the U.S. Nearly 10,000 of the ports’ workers are members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and ILWU membership comes with generous benefits, including annual pay that can top $200,000, health insurance and a pension.

But there are several thousand non-union workers also laboring at the LA/LB Ports, hoping to win entry into the union by amassing enough hours on the job. Among these so-called “casual” workers are a few thousand women, eager to secure those high wages and good benefits for their families.

California long has led the nation in assuring equal job opportunity, especially when it comes to balancing work with family obligations. But at the LA/LB Ports, as alleged in a class-action complaint filed by six women “casuals,” time has stood still. 

Despite decades-old California laws guaranteeing pregnant workers the right to receive modified job assignments to work safely during pregnancy and to have a clean, private place to pump milk after they have their babies, the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents the maritime companies at the ports, provides neither to casual workers. 

As a result, women dockworkers are effectively forced to accept jobs that might be dangerous for them, or turn down work and lose wages and hours accrual toward union membership, while those who are breastfeeding face a choice between staying home—losing still more pay and seniority—or giving up nursing altogether.

According to an OB-GYN and a labor economist who each submitted statements in favor of the women’s case, these policies, in combination, could result in two years or more of lost wages and time on the job—significantly setting back pregnant and postpartum workers in the “hours race” toward gaining full union membership. In this way, women dockworkers are systematically disadvantaged in a field already dominated by men. 

Is this disadvantage by design? 

Whether intentional or otherwise, workplace policies that don’t account for pregnancy and childbirth penalize women for choosing to start a family. In male-dominated sectors, it’s no secret that these policies tend to keep women from lucrative skilled jobs that come with the benefits of union membership. Ironically, the ILWU has negotiated for pregnant women already in the union to have access to modified work assignments. As a workers’ rights advocate, I applaud such efforts. The union’s failure to work equally hard to assure that women not yet in the union’s ranks also are assured the law’s protections is disappointing.

ILWU and PMA recently filed court documents opposing the women dockworkers’ effort to join together as a group to challenge the illegal policies. They do not dispute that pregnant dockworkers are unable to access modified job assignments at the LA/LB Ports, or that they are on their own in finding a suitable place to pump milk. Instead, they argue that the women should not be able to band together to change these policies. ILWU and PMA urge the court to require each and every woman to file her own lawsuit.

That argument isn’t just unrealistic—how many people do you know who can pay an attorney out of their own pocket?—and inefficient—thousands of individual lawsuits are better than just one? It also ignores the reality that standing up to big institutions like the ILWU and PMA is simply too daunting for most people to attempt. Of course, that’s precisely why people join unions in the first place—so that they don’t have to fight workplace-wide injustices alone. 

Protecting the rights of pregnant and breastfeeding workers is a matter of reproductive health and economic security—even more so during a time when women’s bodily autonomy is under attack and so many workers are struggling. It’s hard to understand how California’s clear legal mandate has been ignored for so long at the LA/LB Ports, or why the ILWU and PMA have fought (for over five years) these women’s efforts to bring their workplace into the 21st century. 

The ILWU relies on the powerful labor movement motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” The Pacific Maritime Association boasts that “workplace safety is a key consideration” in its operations. 

It’s long past time for both entities to make the sentiments behind those declarations a reality for pregnant and parenting workers. 

About

Liz Morris is co-director of the Center for WorkLife Law.