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After ten years of litigation and three and a half years of settlement negotiations, ERA cooperating counsel Judith Kurtz finally settled Pallas v. Pacific Bell, and on July 9, 1999, the Federal District Court approved the settlement at a fairness hearing. ERA began representing Lana Pallas in 1989 in a pregnancy discrimination case against her employer, Pacific Bell, which had refused to grant her early retirement benefits.  Ms. Pallas took maternity leave in 1972, but did not get service credit for the time she took off for pregnancy-related disability. At that time, employees who were disabled for any reason other than pregnancy DID get service credit for their time off. Without the service credit for her time on pregnancy disability, Ms. Pallas was a few days short of the service time required for early retirement eligibility. After coming to ERA, Ms. Pallas filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and then a class action case in court. The major obstacle to the case’s victory was the time elapsed since the initial denial of service credit. ERA successfully argued that with each re-computation of an employee’s service date, Pacific Bell committed a new act of discrimination. The class of female Pacific Bell employees in the case were all denied service credit for the pregnancy-related disability leaves they took before the effective date of the Pregnancy Discrimination Amendment of 1978 to Title VII. Losing these credits had a range of effects, the most common being decreased pensions. In 1991, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Pacific Bell was liable for sex discrimination under Title VII, despite the passage of time since ERA’s clients’ maternity leaves. After the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari, the case returned to the district court for determination of the size of the class of women affected by the company’s discriminatory policies and development of an adequate remedy. The class now covers an estimated 10,000 women who took a leave of absence for pregnancy, childbirth or related medical condition before April 29, 1979 and who were still working for the company after January 1, 1984. All class members will receive an adjustment of six to eight weeks for each pre-1979 pregnancy. If they have already retired, they will also receive a lump sum payment to compensate for lost benefits. In addition, there will be a small group of women who lost early retirement opportunities and will be eligible to receive the value of those losses. They may recover $200,000 to $300,000 each. While it is impossible to predict the exact value of the settlement, it is estimated that its value will be in excess of $25 million.

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