What, though, should Starbucks retail chains be doing? Reasonably doing, in this world where there isn’t great maternity leave and there isn’t room in most locations to put in a small pumping room. Yes, they can work out breaks for nursing women, and they can rent them pumps, and they can give them space in the many fridges to store milk. (And they should do these as a matter of course, or at least the first and last of them.) Would that be sufficient, even without a dedicated space?

Well, all of those things: breaks for nursing women, group rates on pump rental (because if Starbucks decided to go with a particular pump for all its nursing employees, I bet they could get a volume discount on the equipment, in the same manner that health insurance is cheaper-per-employee for large corporations than it is for individuals or small businesses), even sacrificing the space that one table takes to provide a small (admittedly probably pretty spartan, but better than sitting on a toilet) lactation “room” (more like closet, true, but still), and yes, adding another bar fridge. I mean they need fridges to store cow and soy milk, anyway.

What else could they do? How about partnering with local day cares so that employees can receive subsidized child-care near their places of employment (on the volume discount theory)? How about including a paid mat. leave as part of their much-vaunted employee benefit package?

If big corporations take the lead and provide accomodations for their front-line staff (the baristas, the shop-workers, the factory-floor workers), they’re not only helping their workers, they’re also providing a positive model for other businesses. If you can point at a Starbucks or a grocery store chain and say “Look, they’ve made these accomodations for women, and it hasn’t affected their profit margins,” to other corporate wanks who insist it can’t be done.

I know if I worked in a larger company (not the 6-8 people at the company I currently work at) I would want some lactation provisios and good paid leave policies(for moms & dads) – even if I never had a baby again. A real luxury would be an on-site daycare facility… that would save time getting to work AND I could visit my baby during the day on my breaks.

You can tell the quality of a company by how it treats it’s lowest earners and in most cases… the quality is very poor.

Frankly, I could see a whole lot of people getting ballistic if they knew their baristas handling their latte were just in the restroom handling her breastmilk.

1) none of the customers’ business.
2) baristas can wash their hands.

years ago, someone related to me a conversation he overheard on a bus between two guys heading to a strip club. The one guy didn’t think topless waitresses were such a great idea b/c they might lactate on the food. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The uninterrupted quiet time and bonding

hear hear. I’d like to hear less pressure on women to breastfeed and more pressure on employers to allow parents of all genders the flexibility to spend time with their children. Many of the supposed benefits of breastfeeding may in fact be due to the uninterrupted quiet time.

Low wage work does not allow compromises with their employees when the employer knows full well that they can re-staff said position easily and have someone functionally trained within a matter of weeks.

And as for ‘benefits’ that Starbucks brags of for family leave, etc., this is only a mere fantasy for millions of people in service work. At all the service jobs I held, holding down to just under 32 hours in order to keep the employee at part-time status was common. Thus, although benefits were promised for fulltime workers, the employer simply staffed with a larger number of part-time workers in order to fulfill staffing demands.

I breastfed all my children. I made the decision to stay at home and work only when absolutely necessary in order to be with them all the time. I don’t know if the choice was a good one as I have no way of knowing how things would have turned out had I left my horrid marriage early, I can only speculate.

But I do know that no matter what the econmic crisis was at the moment or where we were living, or moving to, my children’s feeding schedule never was interrupted. The uninterrupted quiet time and bonding was a consistency that probably helped to keep me together emotionally.

At one job, this mean I worked 80% time to account for the time I breastfed (therefore, was paid less, but could go home on time). At the other job, this meant that I stayed longer to make up for the 2-3 times I had to leave to feed my baby.

My employers (one a small firm, one a university) compromised so that I could do something I thought was very important. Prior to each baby’s birth, I approached each employer and stated how important it was for me to breastfeed my baby, and made my offer so that it didn’t impact my employer much and the employer could see that I was not asking for the moon, either.

Neither job was particularly well paid nor did I really have much in the way of backup; sometimes people had to wait for me to get back, but I never had a complaint.

Both employers sucked it up, though, and for one child I managed 9 months, and the second child managed 6 months.

That was in the 80s. I’m sad that that solution does not appear to be workable now.

I am so very glad to be working in the public sector in an office position now. It took me months to realize that I didn’t have to *ask* to go to the bathroom.

I used to work at the fine jewelry counter of a chain department store. Some days, I would work 8-10 hour shifts without anyone else to relieve me, since we had a fairly small staff, and it was difficult to find anyone else to work if someone called in sick. But I was still not allowed to eat or drink in my department, I couldn’t sit down, and if I wanted to pee, I had to call a manager to watch my department for me, even though security had a camera trained on it all of the time, and the entry to the counter area was locked. If a manager was busy and I had to go, it was too bad. The managers were also not trained to wait on customers in my area (our company basically leased space in the department store, so even the managers knew little to nothing about the department and they had not been bonded, so they really weren’t supposed to handle the jewelry), so they would tell customers to please wait. I got more shit from customers about going to PEE than anything else. Because I should be a machine that doesn’t have bodily needs so that customers won’t be delayed for five minutes in looking at shitty jewelry they probably won’t buy anyway.

I won’t even talk about food service…

/rant

I think they possibly do. Some people don’t consider the person on the other side of the counter as anything other than a machine to serve their wants.