Our breastfeeding employee is spending too much time pumping
A reader writes:
We recently hired a lactating mom with the understanding that it would take her about a year to get down to pumping three times a day. He is being paid for the time he spends pumping. She was provided a comfortable private space to do so and she records the time as “general overhead” on her timesheet (non-billable); This comes to about 90 minutes per day. We are just now, a few months in, realizing how quickly this time adds up – in the last billing period (five weeks) it was about 40 hours! Is there a smart, legal way to ask him to give up some of this time (50%?) so we can get more billable hours from him?
Your company is pro-family, but doing the math turns out that’s about 10 full work weeks per year in paid pumping time, time we can’t bill our clients.
I answer this question – and two others – today in Inc. In, where I’m revisiting letters that are buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding their responses). You You can read it here.
Other questions I’ll be answering there today include:
- I am not included in meetings about my team’s work
- Can I borrow language from other job descriptions?
