Just the facts, ma’am.
Angela over at Breastfeeding 1-2-3 posted some excellent information on exactly how breastfeeding can benefit employers - for example, her site reveals:
CIGNA’s corporate lactation program for employees who breastfeed, revealed a savings of $240 thousand annually in health care expenses for breastfeeding mothers and their children.
This information is based on an UCLA Study of the CIGNA corporate lactation program. Good reading! I love seeing cold, hard figures associated with something like this!
I wonder why employers aren’t more invested in supporting their new mothers? I suspect there may be a bit of an attitude amongst employers that employees aren’t going to stick around for the long-term, anyway. Particularly, with the way many folks go from job to job more easily these days (no judging! I was one of those employees who didn’t hesitate to take better opportunities!) This is definitely the attitude with insurance companies, which is why they don’t support preventative measures as often as you would think - their reasoning is that by the time something serious comes along, you won’t be on their plan any longer anyway. Maybe it would help to clarify the short-term benefits of breastfeeding to employers? They get to see the benefits straight away!
breastfeeding, breastfeeding in the workplace
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June 30th, 2007 at 11:20 am
I work for an unusually progressive global company (they pay for the maternity leave and DON’T count the first 6 to 8 weeks against your FMLA), but oddly enough, they don’t support breastfeeding. We have one room dedicated to breastfeeding (in our complex, which houses 1000 employees), which is basically a restroom that’s got a table in it. We’ve asked for more, but they’re not willing to adapt. So we take more time off-campus to breastfeed. One day, they’ll wise up.