By Josh Richman
STAFF WRITER OAKLAND TRIBUNE
3/21/01 OAKLAND—Four women and a labor union filed
a federal class action lawsuit against AT&T on Tuesday,
claiming the company cheated women out of pension benefits
by discriminating against them for taking pregnancy leave
more than 22 years ago.
An estimated 15,000 women who worked for AT&T and its
subsidiaries and took pregnancy-related leave before April
29, 1979, could be affected, according to Equal Rights Advocates,
a San Francisco-based nonprofit helping to represent the plaintiffs.
AT&T spokeswoman June Rochford said the company had not
yet received a copy of the lawsuit and so could not comment.
The suit—filed in part by the Communications Workers
of America, AFL-CIO—claims that before the Pregnancy
Discrimination Act took effect, AT&T workers who had to
take disability leave were given “service credit”
for their absences while pregnant women were forced to take
“personal leaves” for childbearing. Because they
were denied the credit for that time, many women were excluded
from lucrative early retirement opportunities or were given
lower pension benefits.
For example, plaintiff Noreen Hulteen—wife of former
Hayward council member and mayoral candidate Ron Hulteen—was
forced to take personal leave for her pregnancy and related
disabilities in 1968. Because of this, she was denied eight
months of service credit toward her pension. Since she retired
in 1994, her pension checks have been reduced because of the
lost leave time.
In a similar case against former AT&T subsidiary Pacific
Bell, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against
the company. That case ended in 1998 with a multimillion dollar
settlement including pension adjustments for thousands of
women. All of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case were
involved in that earlier case.
