Court: Women can't count old maternity leave for pensions

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Monday that women who want their maternity leaves calculated fully into retirement benefits cannot sue for leaves taken before a 1978 federal law made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy.

Reversing a lower appeals court decision against AT&T Corp., the justices said the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act does not prevent a company from giving less retirement credit for pregnancy leaves taken earlier in the 1970s than for leaves based on other medical conditions.

Justice David Souter, writing for the majority, said Congress did not intend the PDA to apply retroactively to retirement benefits under otherwise legitimate seniority systems.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined only by Justice Stephen Breyer, said in a dissenting statement that the decision effectively allows continued discrimination based on pregnancy.

The former AT&T workers, Ginsburg wrote, "will receive, for the rest of their lives, lower pension benefits than colleagues who worked for AT&T no longer than they did. They will experience this discrimination not simply because of the adverse action to which they were subjected pre-PDA. Rather they are harmed today because AT&T has refused fully to heed the PDA's core command," that discrimination based on pregnancy must cease.

Ginsburg, the only woman on the nine-member court, noted that "attitudes about pregnancy and childbirth …have sustained pervasive, often law-sanctioned, restrictions on a woman's place among paid workers and active citizens."

Noreen Hulteen and three other women who worked for AT&T started the case, alleging that the company violated anti-bias law by according their pregnancy leaves less retirement credit than medical leave generally. They were seeking greater pension benefits. Lower federal courts ruled for the women in finding that employers could not incorporate pre-PDA accrual differentials into their retirement calculations.

Other lower courts had ruled otherwise, and Monday's decision clears up that split in favor of employers.