Nursing parents still have no place to pump at work. Now they’re suing.

Originally published by The 19th

When Jasmine Emery wasn’t driving the #400/405 bus, she’d use her short breaks to gingerly attach her breast pump under her uniform and hope passengers wouldn’t barge in or hear its suctioning over the hiss and clatter of metro Detroit.

The milk went into a cooler, tucked under a frozen water bottle. There was nowhere to clean her pump when she was done. It was 2021, and Emery was just back from maternity leave after the birth of her third child. The bus wasn’t an ideal place to pump, but it was the best she could do. What rights did she have anyway? she thought. What choice?

But by the time Emery returned to work in April 2024 after the birth of her fourth child, the world had changed. In December 2022, Congress passed a law called the PUMP Act with strong bipartisan support. It mandated that employers give workers adequate break time and a private space — preferably locked — to pump. It also gave workers a new and very powerful weapon: If their bosses didn’t comply, they could sue.

Yet Emery’s bosses, she recalls, just suggested she do the same thing she’d done in 2021: pump on the bus.

Figure it out, she said a supervisor told her. You’re not the first person to have a baby.

This time, Emery knew she could push for more. A friend had told her the new law could protect her, and a call to the Department of Labor confirmed it. “I told myself, ‘I’m not going through that again,’” Emery said. “I believe in breastfeeding. I promote breastfeeding. It’s my right and I want to exercise it at every point.”

For about a month, Emery and her employer, SMART Bus, went back and forth. First, she recalls, they offered to buy her a hands-free pump that she could use on the bus while she wasn’t driving, but pumping in a public space with nine cameras watching her every move robbed her of her privacy.

Next, they put her up in a room at the bus terminal that had no lock — and on the first day a male coworker…