Amazon accused of systematically denying pregnant warehouse workers chairs and breaks

Four former Amazon warehouse employees have filed a proposed nationwide class action accusing the company of routinely refusing pregnant workers the accommodations they are entitled to by law, and then disciplining them for the absences that followed.

The case was filed on Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn and reported by Reuters. It is brought with A Better Balance, a workers’ rights non-profit, and alleges violations of the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and New York labour law.

The complaint refers to thousands of pregnant employees, though it does not specify the size of the proposed class.

The accommodations at issue are not elaborate, as according to the complaint, Amazon denied pregnant workers chairs, bathroom breaks, water breaks, and time to attend prenatal appointments.

It is also alleged to have demanded medical documentation it was not entitled to ask for, and to have threatened and dismissed pregnant employees over excessive absences.

One of the named plaintiffs, Willamina Barclay, was admitted to hospital with a pregnancy-related emergency on 16 June 2025, the complaint says. She was dismissed five days later.

Spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the company provides pregnancy-related accommodations to “tens of thousands of employees annually, and approved more than 99.9% of requests in the last year”, and that the plaintiffs’ descriptions “contain inaccuracies and omit important details”.

None of the allegations has been tested in court, and the company has not been found to have done anything wrong.

That approval figure is worth reading precisely, because it answers a narrower question than it appears to.

An approval rate measures formal requests that were submitted and processed. It does not describe workers who never filed because they were told not to bother, requests that were approved on paper and not honoured on the floor, or what happened to attendance records once an accommodation was in place.

The plaintiffs’ case is not primarily that Amazon said no. It is that saying yes and then counting the absences anyway produced the same outcome.

The legal ground has shifted since Amazon last faced this charge. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect in 2023, requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy and related conditions unless doing so would impose an undue hardship.

And it removed the older requirement that a pregnant worker show she was treated worse than some comparable colleague.

A claim that once turned on proving unequal treatment can now turn on whether an accommodation was provided at all.

The choice of A Better Balance as co-counsel is not incidental, as the organisation was among the advocates that campaigned for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to exist, and a case brought under it against the second-largest private employer in the United States is the kind of test the law was written to invite.

If the class is certified, this becomes one of the larger workouts the statute has had, and the findings would set expectations for every warehouse and fulfilment operation that runs on the same attendance mathematics.

It is also not the first time. TNW reported in 2019 that Amazon was sued over discrimination against pregnant warehouse workers, on allegations that rhyme closely with these. That earlier case is context rather than evidence, and the pattern is the plaintiffs’ claim to make, not ours.

The suit seeks lost pay and benefits, punitive damages and an injunction barring further discrimination.

Class certification is the first real test: a proposed nationwide class has to be certified before any of this becomes more than four people’s accounts, and companies of Amazon’s size generally fight hardest at exactly that stage, because the difference between four plaintiffs and thousands is the difference between a settlement and a reckoning.