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Amazon Accused in Lawsuit of Systematic Discrimination Against Pregnant Employees
Amazon is facing a new proposed nationwide class action lawsuit alleging that the company has systematically discriminated against thousands of pregnant employees, including firing some workers the company claimed had missed too much time on the job. The suit was filed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, by four former warehouse employees, with legal backing from A Better Balance, a nonprofit that focuses on workers’ rights.
According to the complaint, Amazon has routinely violated both federal and New York worker-protection laws by denying pregnant employees basic workplace accommodations that should be relatively simple to provide, things like chairs to sit on during shifts, adequate bathroom and water breaks, and approved time off for prenatal medical appointments. The lawsuit goes further, alleging that Amazon has a pattern of threatening and firing pregnant workers who miss shifts due to pregnancy-related health issues, and that the company illegally demands medical documentation from employees simply asking for reasonable accommodations, a practice the plaintiffs say violates the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act as well as New York labor law.
One of the plaintiffs, Willamina Barclay, describes a particularly stark example in the complaint. She says Amazon issued her a termination warning on June 17, 2025, just one day after she was wheeled out of the company’s Rochester, New York warehouse and hospitalized during a pregnancy-related medical emergency. According to the filing, Barclay had been suffering severe abdominal pain tied to lifting requirements at her job. The timing described in the lawsuit, a hospitalization followed almost immediately by disciplinary action, is likely to become one of the more closely scrutinized details as the case moves forward, since it speaks directly to the plaintiffs’ broader argument that Amazon treats pregnancy-related absences the same way it treats ordinary attendance violations rather than accounting for legally protected medical needs.
The complaint frames Amazon’s scale as central to why this pattern matters so much. With a workforce as large as Amazon’s, the plaintiffs argue, it’s inevitable that a substantial number of employees will be pregnant at any given time, which makes systemic accommodation failures capable of affecting a very large number of workers rather than a handful of isolated cases. That’s the underlying logic behind seeking class action status, since the plaintiffs are asking the court to represent a much broader group of current and former pregnant Amazon employees who may have faced similar treatment.
Amazon has pushed back on the allegations. Company spokesperson Kelly Nantel said Amazon provides pregnancy-related accommodations to tens of thousands of employees every year and approved more than 99.9 percent of accommodation requests over the past year. She added that ensuring the health and well-being of employees is one of the company’s greatest responsibilities. That statement paints a very different picture from the one described in the lawsuit, and the gap between the two will likely be a central question as the litigation proceeds, whether Amazon’s high approval rate for accommodation requests reflects consistent policy across its vast warehouse network, or whether the plaintiffs’ experiences represent a meaningful subset of workers who fell through the cracks despite that broader statistic.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has faced legal action over how it treats pregnant and disabled warehouse workers. New Jersey’s attorney general sued the company roughly 11 months ago, accusing Amazon of widespread discrimination against warehouse employees who were either pregnant or had disabilities. New York state pursued a similar case against the company back in 2022. Taken together, these lawsuits suggest a recurring pattern of complaints across multiple states rather than a single isolated dispute, even though each case involves its own set of plaintiffs, allegations, and legal theories.
Amazon’s broader labor track record adds context to how this lawsuit is likely to be received. The company has faced repeated legal challenges over its treatment of employees more broadly, including disputes tied to unionization efforts at facilities like the Staten Island warehouse that voted to unionize in 2022. As the second-largest private employer in the United States behind Walmart, with roughly 1.58 million full-time and part-time employees as of the end of 2025, Amazon’s labor practices carry outsized weight simply because of how many workers they touch, and lawsuits alleging systemic issues tend to draw significant attention given that scale.
The regulatory backdrop surrounding pregnancy discrimination claims has also been shifting. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency typically responsible for enforcing workplace discrimination protections, has taken a notably different posture under its current leadership. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has previously said she believes existing regulations protecting pregnant workers are overly broad, a stance that has raised questions among worker advocacy groups about how aggressively federal regulators will pursue pregnancy discrimination cases going forward. That dynamic makes private lawsuits like this one, brought by advocacy organizations rather than government agencies, an increasingly important avenue for workers seeking to enforce protections under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
The lawsuit is seeking several forms of relief on behalf of the proposed class, including compensation for lost pay and benefits, punitive damages, and a court injunction that would bar Amazon from continuing the alleged discriminatory practices going forward. If the case is certified as a class action, it could expose Amazon to significant financial liability and force changes to how the company handles accommodation requests and attendance policies for pregnant employees across its warehouse network, which spans hundreds of facilities nationwide.
For now, the case is in its early stages, and Amazon will have the opportunity to respond formally to the allegations in court. Given the company’s public statistics on accommodation approval rates, its legal team is likely to argue that the plaintiffs’ experiences represent exceptions rather than evidence of a systemic policy failure. The plaintiffs and A Better Balance, meanwhile, will need to build a case showing that these incidents reflect a broader pattern rather than isolated management decisions at individual warehouses, a distinction that will likely shape much of the early legal wrangling before the case reaches any decision on class certification.
Workplace advocates are likely to watch this case closely regardless of outcome, since it touches on protections under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a relatively recent federal law that expanded requirements for employers to accommodate pregnant workers. How courts interpret and enforce that law in cases involving major employers like Amazon could have ripple effects across other large companies managing similarly scaled hourly workforces.
