By Melanie Payne
SACRAMENTO BEE STAFF WRITER

3/21/01 SAN FRANCISCO—Former AT&T employees filed a lawsuit against the communications giant Tuesday, saying pregnancy discrimination they suffered 20 years ago is costing them today.

The plaintiffs were required to take leaves of absences for pregnancies during the 1960s and 1970s and were not given service credit toward retirement. Employees who took leaves for other medical conditions were given the service credits.

As a result, the 15,000 or so women potentially covered in the class action ended up losing benefits, according to the suit filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California. The lawsuit contends the continuing effect of the discrimination violates the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1979 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Although the company has changed its practice of treating pregnancy differently than other short-term disabilities, the company has not re-instated the service credit for the women in the class, the suit says.

The lawsuit contends the women asked AT&T to change the policy and not penalize them for the leave they took while pregnant, but AT&T refused. The suit says the company ignored an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision that AT&T’s benefit calculations policy did not comply with the law.

AT&T spokesman Burke Stinson said Tuesday that the company made a settlement years ago regarding disparate treatment of pregnancy disability benefits and that “a review of our current policies was judged to be A-OK.”

But one of the lawyers on the case, Oakland attorney Blythe Mickelson, said AT&T has ignored the EEOC ruling and a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals 1991 decision in a similar case.

In that case, court determined that Pacific Bell’s pension calculation policies denied early retirement offers to women who had taken pregnancy leaves before 1979. The case was resolved with a multimillion-dollar settlement.