A Pregnant Amazon Employee Asked for a Chair to Sit on—and Wound Up Homeless

Genesis and her daughterMother Jones; Imago/Zuma; Courtesy of Genesis

Soon after Genesis found out she was pregnant, in the spring of 2024, she brought a doctor’s note to work. Then 20 years old, Genesis was a “stower” at an Amazon warehouse in Southern California, placing items as heavy as 50 pounds into moving pods. She wanted to continue working full-time to save up for her baby’s arrival, but, according to the note, she would need to take regular breaks, limit bending and twisting, and lift no more than 20 pounds at a time. The restrictions were particularly important, as Genesis, who requested to go by her first name to protect her privacy, had a medical condition that made her prone to fainting.

But Genesis says her manager wrote her up for sitting down and taking breaks. Shortly thereafter, she says, her higher-ups gave her an ultimatum: “They basically told me you can keep doing your job the way we want you to do it without the chair or without the breaks or you can go on unpaid leave.”

Under federal law^[2], companies like Amazon are required to provide “reasonable accommodations” to pregnant workers—changes^[3] like allowing breaks, chairs to sit on while working, or schedule changes to allow for doctor’s visits. But Genesis is one of several^[4] Amazon^[5] employees^[6] now alleging that the country’s largest employer of warehouse workers is delaying or failing to make these accommodations—with sometimes devastating health and financial effects.

She is a featured speaker at a rally today in New York City that’s organized by the advocacy campaign Warehouse Life, which is demanding that Amazon solve this issue without delay. “This is not rocket science,” says Chloe Sigal, a senior organizer at Online to Offline Strategies who helped plan the campaign. “We’re talking about pregnant people not being forced to lift heavy, heavy items, not being forced to climb ladders with big baby bumps, being able to go to the bathroom when they need to throw up.”

In response, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said, “We recognize these are deeply personal experiences,” but “they are not reflective of the extensive accommodations and benefits we provide to support our employees. The fact is we offer comprehensive employee accommodations throughout their pregnancy journey and postpartum,” including paid pregnancy-related disability and parental leave.

Scared for the health of her baby, Genesis went on unpaid leave in May for a few weeks. When Amazon’s Disability and Leave Services team approved a new role in mid-June that would fit her needs, Genesis arrived at the warehouse—only to be told by managers at the site that the role didn’t exist and she couldn’t work more than 20 hours a week. She was parked at a desk, where there was little work to do; she did homework for her associate degree to pass the time. Some weeks, she earned as little as $192. Instead of saving up, she could barely pay rent. As the summer progressed, she regularly sent emails to the DLS team asking for updates to her accommodations.

“We are still working with the site to see if your restrictions can be accommodated,” the team wrote at the end of July.

“I was wondering if there was any update?” Genesis wrote in August, about three months after her doctor’s note requesting accommodations. “I feel as though I’m being limited right now.”

Amazon promotes^[7] itself as offering up to 20 weeks of paid leave for birthing parents who are eligible hourly workers, including four weeks before the baby is born. But Genesis’ leave, which started when she went into preterm labor in September, was unpaid. In an email to Genesis, DLS explained that her leave didn’t qualify for protections under the Family and Medical Leave Act because she hadn’t worked the required 1,250 hours over the previous 12 months. A review of her pay stubs by Mother Jones found that she had worked more than 1,300 hours over the previous 10 months, and, between two stints at Amazon, had worked at the company for a total of 15 months.

Unable to pay rent, Genesis and her partner moved with their infant into their Nissan Ultima, replacing the passenger seat with a mattress. They parked in Kaiser Permanente hospital parking lots, covering the windows, hoping they wouldn’t be kicked out.

Genesis gets emotional talking about this period of living out of a car with an infant. “They’re always dirty, and it starts to get to your skin and their skin, and you have to figure out how to sterilize bottles if you’re not breastfeeding,” she told me.

Of Amazon, she said, “You’re just another number to them.”

Amazon didn’t respond to questions about Genesis’ case, but a spokesperson said that employees who aren’t satisfied with their accommodations “have a number of channels through which they can escalate their concerns.” The spokesperson added, “While some cases take longer to resolve than we’d like, we’ve continued to reduce the time it takes to review and complete accommodations requests.”

Today’s rally is the latest attempt to put pressure on the online retailer. In June, when labor leader Erica Smiley, the executive director of Jobs With Justice, won an award with the Women’s Media Center, she used the opportunity to talk about issues facing pregnant Amazon warehouse workers. She talked about Jennifer Hatch, a worker in Lancaster, New York, whose manager allegedly refused to let her sit earlier this year even though she was visibly pregnant, had asthma, and was struggling to breathe, according to charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Four times, Hatch clocked out early to go to the emergency room because of severe abdominal pain; Amazon deducted attendance points each time, and, according to the charges, fired her shortly thereafter without warning. (An Amazon spokesperson said they couldn’t respond to the details of Hatch’s case, adding that the company works with employees to determine suitable modifications.)

“This is pretty consistently the top thing that people will care about,” Smiley told me. Workers will “risk their lives. But if you’re risking the lives of their kids, they’re going to have a problem with that.”

Smiley’s talk caught the attention of celebrities. That month, Jane Fonda, Cynthia Nixon, Sally Field, and other luminaries signed^[9] an open letter^[10] to Edith Cooper, the chair of Amazon’s Leadership Development and Compensation Committee, calling on the company to respond to pregnant workers’ concerns. “Pregnant Amazon workers are sharing stories of being forced to work at a breakneck pace, and even being forced to lift heavy products and climb tall ladders even with big baby bumps in late pregnancy,” reads the letter. “The result? Severe health complications, miscarriages, and total loss of income with no ability to access parental leave benefits as Amazon workers are either terminated or quit due to their impossible circumstances.”

Meanwhile, the Warehouse Life team put out a call to Amazon workers asking for their pregnancy stories. Since May, the team has collected^[11] more than 450 stories, Sigal says, only three of which were positive.

For years, Amazon has been under government investigations into allegations of pregnancy discrimination. After five warehouse workers filed EEOC charges in 2020 and 2021, the agency opened an ongoing systemic investigation into whether the company fails to accommodate workers’ pregnancies and forces them to take unpaid leaves of absence. (“While we are limited in discussing ongoing legal matters, it’s important to note that all of these cases originated in 2020 and 2021,” Nantel said. “Since then, Amazon has significantly enhanced our pregnancy accommodation procedures, and continues to follow all local laws and regulations.”) In 2022, New York State Division of Human Rights filed^[12] a separate complaint in a pending case against Amazon with similar allegations.

Meanwhile, workers continue to file EEOC charges against Amazon, claiming their requests for restrictions on heavy lifting and other accommodations were delayed or denied. They include Michelle Posey^[13], a warehouse worker in Oklahoma who, in 2020, collapsed at work due to dehydration and was taken away in an ambulance, and a Virginia employee^[14] I’ll call “Jessica,” who, in 2024, was allegedly put in roles requiring heavy lifting and use of chemicals that cause reproductive harm, and eventually resigned. (Posey’s charge was resolved; Jessica’s case is still ongoing. An Amazon spokesperson said Posey “received several supportive measures,” including schedule and assignment changes, and couldn’t comment on the details of Jessica’s case.)

Pregnancy discrimination has long been prohibited under the Americans With Disabilities Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Though some states have required employers to make pregnancy accommodations for years, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect in 2023, introduced such protections nationally. A recent study^[15] by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that states newly covered by the PWFA saw a 3.2 percent increase in births, suggesting that the law has helped reduce miscarriage rates by nearly 9.6 percent.

These laws are enforced by the EEOC, a federal agency that has been weakened and whose priorities have dramatically shifted under Trump. In January, Trump fired two EEOC commissioners—a first in the agency’s 60-year history—leaving the agency until recently without the three-person quorum required^[16] to approve impact litigation or issue new guidance. Trump has directed^[17] the agency to deprioritize “disparate impact” cases, which involve neutral policies that have an outsized impact on disadvantaged groups. Andrea Lucas, the Trump-appointed acting chair of the commission, is opposed^[18] to elements^[19] of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act that allow workers time off to get an abortion, and wants to revisit the EEOC’s guidance on the legislation.

House Republicans recently approved^[20] a funding bill cutting the budget by $19 million in 2026. By some estimates^[21], the cuts could leave the agency, which advocates have long said is underfunded and understaffed, with almost 50 percent less staff than it had in 1980. (The agency didn’t respond to requests for comment; it is currently closed due to the government shutdown.)

“Everybody who goes to the EEOC needs help, and they needed it yesterday,” says Katherine Greenberg, vice president of litigation at A Better Balance, a legal advocacy group that has represented several pregnant workers bringing EEOC charges against Amazon. “The folks I know at EEOC are hardworking, dedicated, and care about their cases—but you can’t do that when you have 500 cases.”

Genesis hasn’t filed a complaint with the EEOC. While navigating homelessness with a newborn, it wasn’t her top priority. But her life now looks dramatically different than it did a year ago. She works at an animal shelter and lives in transitional housing with her partner and her now-toddling one-year-old. She’s talking publicly about her experience at Amazon, and working with a lawyer to assess her options.

“I’m speaking out now because I realize it’s important for other people to realize that they’re not alone” she told me. Until recently, she says, “I really thought I was the only person.”