IBM Delivers: Traveling Moms' Breast Milk Ships Home Free
Pregnancy News
Obie Editorial Team
One high-tech giant — IBM — has recently announced a novel new approach for integrating work and family needs: breastfeeding female employees who travel on company business can have their breast milk shipped home free of charge. Previously, traveling mothers had little option other than to pump and dump expressed milk, a situation that was wasteful, frustrating, and required the baby to feed on something else while mom traveled.
Barbara Brickmeier, an IBM vice president of benefits, says the company is experimenting with this policy to gauge interest but if it helps women balance work and family, the policy will continue. Women make up about 29% of the total IBM workforce, including 25% of its global management staff. IBM’s Ginni Rometty is one of only 24 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Innovation and competition are the backbone of the high-tech industry and when one company devises a winning solution to a product or policy, others often follow suit. The industry catches flack for its lack of gender and ethnic diversity but it does value employee retention. To encourage a return to work as a family grows, some new family-friendly innovations include:
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare) requires businesses with 50 or more employees to provide breastfeeding mothers ample and flexible break time to pump breast milk during a work shift for a full year after the birth of a child. These companies must provide a place “shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public” for breast pumping. Breast pumping in bathrooms is not allowed under any circumstances anywhere ever. Whether or not breastfeeding moms get paid while pumping depends on the company’s break policy for all employees.
Companies with fewer than 50 employees are encouraged but not required to offer the same breastfeeding liberties to their working mothers. Where state policy allows more generous opportunities to pump, state law trumps federal guidelines.
The ACA requires all healthcare insurance plans to cover the cost of breast pumps but individual plans offer different terms:
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