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06.01.2010 Newsletters Doerner

Employment: DOL Issues A Fact Sheet on Required Breaks for Nursing Mothers

In our June 2010 ELR, we discussed the provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requiring employers to provide nursing mothers the space and time to express milk in the workplace.

The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor has issued Fact Sheet #73 related to that law. It provides some of the more specific requirements related to the employer’s responsibility to provide the space and time required under the Act. Additional guidance in the fact sheet reiterates that while employers do not have to compensate employees for these breaks, if the employer has compensated break time, an employee who uses that time to express milk must be compensated in the same way that other employees are compensated for break time. Further, the FLSA’s general requirement that the employee must be completely relieved from duty or else the time must be compensated as work time applies to these breaks as well. You can read the Fact Sheet #73.

By McLaine DeWitt Herndon, mherndon@dsda.com

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