Former Sun Country employee's suit alleges humiliation, retaliation for pumping breast milk at work

A former employee of Sun Country Airlines sued the Twin Cities commercial carrier alleging that she suffered months of humiliating and retaliatory treatment for pumping breast milk on the job for her baby daughter.

Hani Ali's lawsuit, filed last week in Hennepin County District Court, contends the airline violated the state's Human Rights Act and Women's Economic Security Act to the point that she could not endure the toxic environment and had to quit within months of being hired as a customer service agent at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Ali, 27, of Minneapolis is seeking compensation for lost wages, emotional distress and mental anguish, and an injunction to ensure that Sun Country and other airlines do not subject other new parents to similar mistreatment.

"No one should be punished or retaliated against at work for pumping milk to keep their newborn fed," Ali said in a statement released on her behalf by Gender Justice, a Twin Cities-based legal and policy advocacy organization assisting her with the legal action.

"The way I was treated as a new mother at work was wrong," said the Minneapolis mother of two who started to work for Sun Country in September 2021, "and I want to make sure it never happens to anyone else again."

In response to the suit, airline spokeswoman Wendy Burt said Tuesday that "since this is in litigation, I cannot discuss the case."

In announcing the suit, a statement from Gender Justice contended that the airline knew when it hired her that she would need a place to pump and would require breaks to do so. Its poor treatment of Ali began even before her first shift, the statement continued, when supervisors told her there was no designated nursing room and she should use the baggage claim office — a high-traffic area with doors and large windows.

The suit spells out numerous and various other allegations against a supervisor, a coworker and company leadership. They include:

Ali, a practicing Muslim who needed to remove her hijab and expose her hair and breasts to pump milk, noticed a male coworker staring at her through a window while she tended to her task in the baggage claim office as directed by her supervisor. She waved him away, but he continued to leer at her.

"Upon realizing that she was being watched, Ms. Ali had to make the split-second decision whether to cover her head or her breasts," the suit read. "She chose her breasts."

The coworker left and brought back a male manager, who told her to use a public bathroom. The two men then filed a complaint with the company's human resources department against Ali, and she was told she could no longer enter the baggage claim office for any reason.

This left Ali with only a broken refrigerator available to store her breast milk and one place to go when she needed to pump: a public nursing area in the terminal. But she could get there only by passing through security — a process that added up to 20 minutes of travel time to her pumping breaks and required security checks of her breast pump and the ice-filled portable container she needed to keep her milk cool.

As Ali's pumping breaks grew longer, her coworkers' resentment and hostility increased, the lawsuit said. Supervisors stopped scheduling her to work inside the terminal — closer to the only place Ali could pump. When she asked one supervisor why she wasn't assigned inside the terminal, she was told it was because of her pumping.

Ali's repeated requests for intervention by Sun Country's human resources team produced no improvements and inadequate communication from the airline's administration. Unable to cope with the constant stress of dealing with her circumstances, Ali resigned in March 2022.

Upon request, Burt provided the Star Tribune with Sun Country's current policy on lactation accommodations, which among other things pledges that employees will be provided "a reasonable amount of break time to accommodate an employee's need to express breast milk [and] will provide employees with the use of a clean, private and secure room or location, other than a toilet stall, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public."

Burt said the company's policies are routinely updated, but she did not say when this one in particular underwent any changes.

Sara Jane Baldwin, senior staff attorney for Gender Justice, said her group would work on behalf of Ali and other women.

"Sun Country Airlines responded to a mother's entirely reasonable requests for a place to pump and store milk for her new baby with a relentless campaign of bullying, discrimination, and retaliation that left her no choice but to leave a job she wanted to keep," she said. "We're putting Sun Country and all employers on notice that Minnesota's strong protections for women in the workplace will be enforced."