Breastfeeding - Baby-friendly Workplaces

A few smart companies have realized that being family-friendly is good business. See the page on the benefits of breastfeeding for the mother's employer for some information on this.

What can a company do to be baby-friendly? Here are a few obvious possibilities. While it might look like a company could not afford to spend money on these, in fact it is to the company's advantage to do so. Just one quick example: all of these measures greatly decrease employee turnover rates. Assuming that recruiting and training a new employee costs about $50,000, you can see that providing several months of parental leave, three years of nursing breaks, and maintaining a lactation room would easily save you money. Of course, the exact range of benefits that would be profitable for a given company would depend on many factors, most importantly the size of the company (a bigger one could easily employ a lactation consultant, for example, while a smaller company might find it easier to accommodate flexible working hours to provide nursing breaks).

• Parental leave
  • Give employees paid maternity and paternity leaves.
  • Give employees the option of taking a longer, unpaid parental leave with job security. Many people would probably take advantage of this if they knew that their job would still be there when they came back.
• Child care: on-site child-care is the best, but probably alternatives can be found.
• Special for breastfeeding mothers:
  • Nursing breaks. At least two half-hour breaks daily for breastfeeding. This wastes no more time than an average smoker's smoking breaks. However, unlike smoking breaks, it helps the employee, the baby, and the employer!
  • Lactation rooms: some employers provide semi-private rooms where breastfeeding mothers express or pump milk to take back to their baby (or just to maintain their milk supply). Some companies also provide subsidies for breastpump rental or purchase.
  • Lactation consultants: some bigger companies hire a full-time lactation consultant.

Here are some companies that provide lactation rooms and other baby-friendly features:

• Starbucks Coffee
• Cigna
• Menasha
• First Chicago NBD
• National Semiconductor
• Eddie Bauer

Back to the breastfeeding main page

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