Breastfeeding

Breast-feeding Rights

There are several reasons why breast-feeding should not be a legal requirement for the workplace. Most importantly, breast-feeding or expressing (artificially removing and storing milk) increases costs in many ways. It is very time consuming, which keeps an employee from doing their work efficiently. Having to breast-feed a child also causes other employees to be distracted from their own work. Mothers who return to work and want to continue breast-feeding are a minority, and you can not cater to every minority issue at every job. There are several alternatives to breast-feeding at work if one chooses they want to continue the process.

There are many expenses that can occur if a company decides to allow and accomidate to breast-feeding mothers. There would need to be an extra room added to the facility. This room would need to have air vents, a locking door, electrical power, a sink, a refrigerator, and complete privacy. Not only would it be costly to add on a room (or renovate an existing room) and buy a refrigerator, but it would increase the electricity cost because of the extra room to keep the appropriate temperature and power used for the refrigerator and to pump with the machine. Another sink also increases water costs.

Another increased cost would be to eliminate the area of toxins. It is mandatory that hazardous chemicals must be publicized to all employees. Many different chemical agents can be concentrated and excreted through the breast milk to the infant (Kipen, 1994.) Therefore, if we legalize breast-feeding in the workplace, we will need to take regular workplace air samples to ensure proper ventilation and monitor the levels of toxins in the air. You may even have to purchase special scavenger units that collect any gases in the air (Rosenthal, 2001.)

Another major reason to not allow breast-feeding at work is that it is time consuming. When pumping milk, generally, the mother should express milk for every nursing she is missing. This helps to maintain the milk production. For example, if it were a nine to five job, the mother would need to pump milk at least three times during that time period. Each expressing takes around thirty minutes. That results in almost two hours of the workday missed. This is time you, as the employer, will have to be paying her for even though no work is being done. There is not enough time in the workday that will allow for someone to miss hours of work. There are many jobs that can’t be flexible with these hours (Rosenthal, 2001.)

If the mother chooses to have the child brought to work for every feeding, this would be very distracting to her and to other co-workers. It would impede the mothers job performance and cause distractions to co-workers. There is also the issue of insurance regulations and building codes