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Supreme Court Rules Pensions Need Not Include Maternity Leave Taken Prior To Pregnancy Discrimination Act
The Supreme Court on Monday in a 7-2 decision ruled that employers are not required to award women credit toward pension benefits for maternity leave taken before Congress passed the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which states that pregnancy should be treated like other temporary disabilities, the New York Times reports. The majority opinion stated that the 1978 law, which made pregnancy-related discrimination a form of sex discrimination, was not retroactive; therefore, employers were not required to adjust the pension calculations for these women. The case decided Monday -- AT&T v. Hulteen -- involved four women who had taken maternity leaves before 1978, when it was legal for employers to treat pregnancy leave differently from other types of disability leave. In the majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that the women are not entitled to full credit for their pregnancy leaves and will therefore receive smaller pensions, the Times reports. Souter was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented. Souter"s ruling was based in great part on a 1976 Supreme Court ruling, General Electric v. Gilbert, which found that policies treating pregnancy leave worse than other types of disability leaves did not amount to sex discrimination (Liptak, New York Times, 5/19). Congress swiftly overruled Gilbert by passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 5/19). Ginsburg in the dissent wrote that the court had "erred egregiously" in Gilbert, which she said advanced the "strange notion that a benefits classification excluding" pregnant women is not based on sex "because other women are among the favored class ("non-pregnant persons")." Ginsburg said that in passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Congress did not intend to continue reducing women"s compensation, including pension benefits, "attributable to their placement on pregnancy leave," adding that the women involved in the case will receive smaller pensions than their colleagues for the rest of their lives (New York Times, 5/19). "[A]ttitudes about pregnancy and childbirth ... have sustained pervasive, often law-sanctioned, restrictions on a woman"s place among paid workers and active citizens," Ginsburg said (Biskupic, USA Today, 5/19).ImpactJudith Kurtz, a plaintiffs" attorney in the case, said the ruling will affect thousands of women across the country, nearly all of them in the telecommunications industry. Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, said that the decision is "a painful and serious blow to America"s working women and the families who rely on their retirement benefits" (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/19). Ness said that the decision "forces women to pay a high price today because their employers discriminated yesterday" (Holland, AP/Google.com, 5/18). She added, "In the current economic climate, women and their families cannot afford to see their retirement benefits kept lower by discriminatory workplace policies that should have been remedied decades ago" (Mears, CNN.com, 5/18). Some women"s rights advocates said the ruling is comparable to the pay discrimination decision against Lilly Ledbetter in 2007. Marcia Greenberger of the National Women"s Law Center said the decision was "an all-too-timely reminder of the importance of having on the Supreme Court justices who understand the real-world impact of the law" (Savage, Los Angeles Times, 5/19).
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Boys With Intermittent Eye Deviation Appear More Likely To Develop Mental Illness
Children and especially boys diagnosed with intermittent exotropia, a condition in which the eye turns outward (away from the nose) only some of the time, appear more likely to develop mental illness by young adulthood than children without strabismus (when the eyes deviate or are misaligned when looking at an object), according to a report in the June issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
News of the day
New York Times Examines Program To Help Orphans Survive 'Fragile Days Of Infancy'
The New York Times examines a program being offered at an orphanage in Tanzania that provides emotional and physical support for newborns and young children who are at a high risk of death after losing their mothers in infancy. "Africa is full of at least 50 million orphans, the legacy of AIDS and other diseases, war and high rates of death in pregnancy and childbirth," the newspaper writes. "With the numbers increasing every day, Africans are struggling to care for them, often in ways that differ strikingly from the traditional concept of an orphanage in the developed world."
Oncology

Retirement Study: Hypertension Among Lower-Status Employees Lingers Well Into Retirement

Retirement from some occupations may not provide relief from the potentially devastating health effects of work-related hypertension, according to a new study from UC Davis. Published in the June issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the study is the first to show that retirement-aged Americans who held higher-status jobs - such as chief executives, financial managers and management analysts - tend to have the lowest rates of hypertension, while those who had lower-status jobs tend to have the highest rates. Hypertension is diagnosed when blood pressure on the artery walls is consistently too high. This condition can eventually damage cells of the arteries" inner lining, leading to angina, heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, kidney failure and other serious health problems. "People"s occupations during their working years can clearly be a risk for hypertension after they retire," said senior study author Paul Leigh, a professor with the Center for Healthcare Policy and Research and the Department of Public Health Sciences at UC Davis. "The body seems to have built up a stress reaction that takes years to ramp down and may last well beyond age 75." While one European study correlated pre-retirement jobs with heart disease among seniors, most similar research has focused on working people between the ages of 25 and 65. Consequently, Leigh said, "it"s been an open question whether occupations could influence hypertension after retirement, and we wanted to help close that gap in the research." Leigh, an expert in economics and occupational illnesses, and study co-author Juan Du, who recently received her Ph.D. from UC Davis and is now an assistant professor in the School of Business at The College of New Jersey, based their research on data compiled by the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, the study surveys more than 22,000 non-institutionalized Americans over the age of 50 every two years and includes detailed information on job history, health status, lifestyle and socioeconomic factors. Using data collected between March 2004 and February 2005, Leigh and Du looked at 7,289 men and women over the age of 65. Their occupations during working years ran the gamut - from managers and white-collar professionals to clerical and blue-collar workers. Just a small percentage was still working at the time the data was collected - 10 percent of 65-year-olds and 2 percent of 75-year-olds. The researchers then divided sub-samples by age groups - 65 and older, 70 and older and 75 and older - as well as by job type, job tenure, gender and physician diagnosis of hypertension. After controlling for variables such as education, race, income, smoking, alcohol consumption, body mass index and co-morbidities, they analyzed the data for statistical associations. What they found with retirees was consistent with studies of those who are currently employed: higher-status occupations are associated with less hypertension than lower-status occupations. "For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that the people at the top would be more likely to have hypertension, but just the opposite is true," said Leigh. "Hypertension is more common among people on the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder." Unlike executives and professionals like architects and engineers, Leigh explained, workers in positions such as sales, administrative support, construction and food preparation have little control over decision-making, are under pressure to get a specified amount of work done in a certain amount of time and may feel inadequate about their positions in the workplace hierarchy. Consequently, their stress levels tend to be higher, which can lead to high blood pressure and, eventually, hypertension. There were two interesting gender-related distinctions between the outcomes of this study and others. Overall, the link between higher-status occupation and lower prevalence of hypertension was stronger for male seniors than for female seniors. Moreover, females in professional positions had more hypertension than female managers, whereas male professionals did not have more hypertension than male managers. Leigh explained that this anomaly could be reflective of the fact that women have historically held lower-status professional jobs than men. "Professional occupations include teaching and nursing, which in the past were jobs typically held by women," Leigh said. "Women in the study did not tend to be doctors or lawyers, meaning that they were more likely to have jobs on the lower rungs of the professions. This could account for their higher prevalence of hypertension when compared to female managers. Whatever the reason, the link between women in professional jobs and their risks of hypertension deserves more study." The most important study outcome, according to Leigh, is that the pool of people thought to have job-related hypertension may be considerably larger than previously assumed. One study estimated that 12 percent of all coronary heart disease deaths can be attributed to occupation. When this estimate is applied to seniors, there could be an additional 2.1 million people in the United States with job-related hypertension. Leigh hopes that this study will help bring job history on par with lifestyle factors when physicians consider hypertension risks with their patients. "Even among the obese, we found that occupation correlated closely with hypertension," Leigh said. "We don"t want to downplay the importance of lifestyle issues and health. But, in addition to recommending lifestyle changes and prescribing medication, physicians could advocate for a change of working conditions for these jobs in society at large to improve health outcomes for workers." "Hypertension and Occupation Among Seniors" was funded by a grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Karen Finney University of California - Davis - Health System


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