Nursing mothers need private space. “We think there will be employers who are compelled to solve this problem,” Mamava president and cofounder Sascha Mayer said on Tuesday. In the future, Mayer said, “hopefully there is an assumption there are lactation accommodations in every business and public environment.”
The PUMP Act, or Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act, updates a 2010 law that required employers with more than 50 workers to provide reasonable break time and a private space — not a bathroom — for hourly workers to pump milk.
The PUMP Act expands the right to nearly 9 million salaried workers who weren’t covered under the original law, including teachers and farmworkers, according to the Center for WorkLife Law. The group said the new law will close a coverage gap that left one in four women without federal protections for taking a break to pump milk at work.
The law doesn’t specify what kind of space must be provided, as long as it’s private. But it says employers must allow a “reasonable” break time, which for some women might be 20 minutes and for others, 40 minutes, Kirwin said. It should also have access to an electrical outlet, a clean surface to rest the pump on and a door that protects the worker from intrusions, Kirwin said.
“Thinking about what privacy looks like, it must be shielded from view, and that includes security cameras or surveillance,” Kirwin said. People who are working from home are covered, too; they must be allowed to take a break, Morris said in the webinar.
“One thing we see with teleworking employees is that the manager is like, ‘You’re at home, and your baby is at home; you can’t take any breaks.’ A hostility develops,” she said. “Telecommunicating employees are equally entitled to take these breaks. And they should be allowed to turn off their cameras.”
If people are traveling for work, she added, it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure the worker has space and time to breastfeed.
“The burden shouldn’t be left on the employee to find a way to arrange that,” Morris said.
All this puts Mamava in a good position to sell its units. The company, which placed its first pod at Burlington International Airport in 2013, has sold 4,000 of its enclosed, roughly egg-shaped structures to date and has been growing rapidly. About 1,200 units shipped last year, Mayer said, and this year Mamava has received more customer enquiries than at any time in its history.
“And that’s the area where there is the biggest opportunity,” she said.
Mamava sells a small unit for employers for around $9,500 that is designed for someone who wants to check their email while they’re pumping. The units for private employers don’t need to have the same arresting graphics as their counterparts in public places, which are meant to attract attention, she said. Fridges for storing breast milk are optional.
Human resources managers and others are scrambling to comply with the new law. Mayer said 700 people signed up for the company’s webinar on the PUMP Act, a tenfold increase over the typical number that logs in for a Mamava webinar.
Mamava, which is owned by its group of cofounders, makes 80 percent of its units at a factory in Springfield. The rest are made at a contract manufacturer in Wisconsin. The company has 75 employees, including 25 on the manufacturing side.
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2023.
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