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Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Volume 161 No. 34 SERVING SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1934
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CFA demands lactation spaces on campus By Melany Gutierrez STAFF WRITER
Amidst ongoing bargaining with the California State University System (CSU) and the recent authorization to strike, members of the California Faculty Association (CFA) are calling for the creation of safe spaces that can cater to their physical and mental needs as working parents, specifically the need for lactation spaces. Lactation spaces are rooms that allow mothers to pump and collect breast milk privately and enables them to tend to their physical needs, such as self clean up after lactation processes, according to a website by Purdue University. The room should contain comfortable seating, a work counter, electrical outlets for breast pumps and a sink within accessible distance, according to the same website. Ray Buyco, San José State University chapter president of CFA and history senior lecturer said the call for lactation spaces was based on a bargaining survey that went out to all CSU campuses. He said it was one of the more popular bargaining subjects selected in the survey by CFA members. Buyco said that the lack of spaces available to professors as parents is an institutional issue and is the product of the culture established around that institution. He also said it’s part of a developed notion that faculty and their necessities are labor costs. “The issue with the notion of lactation spaces is that there’s a cost to it,” Buyco said. “It is this notion of not recognizing one’s humanity despite the fact that an educational institution should be devoted to recognizing the humanity of the people and the community that are associated with it.” Susana Gallardo, women, gender and sexuality studies assistant professor, said she believes that this call to recognize parental needs and
motherhood is a smaller part in a long-standing feminist battle of trying to make the workplace more accommodating for women. “Childcare and lactation rooms are two of the things that make it really feasible and reasonable for a woman to go back to work when she wants to,” Gallardo said. She said the negligence to acknowledge the importance of parental responsibilities comes from workplace culture in the United States. “We (in the U.S.) do not value domestic labor or reproductive labor,” Gallardo said. “Our attitude is that if you’re going to have a kid, it’s your problem and your responsibility and we (the government) don’t have anything to do with that.” Sabrina Pinnell, CFA chapter secretary and political science senior lecturer, said this issue is important to all faculty, not only women, but parents who generally have busy schedules and full days of back-to-back classes. “Even if we’re not bringing our children to campuses, we have people who express milk throughout the day. We have people who need to be able to store it (their milk),” Pinnell said. “So if we’re not teaching from home, obviously we’re on campus, we need facilities to do that and we need them within reasonable distance and access.” Pinnell said the CFA’s call for lactation spaces emphasizes the necessity for them to be clean. She said that lactation spaces are usually not abundant and the lactation spaces she does see are not in good condition and are often unsanitary. “When it comes to lactation spaces, we’re talking about the need for separate spaces where people can go, close the door, have some privacy, perhaps spaces to store milk,” Pinnell said. “That is rare, comparatively speaking, but this is for the people who can’t leave campus often for hours, who have to do this within the space of a few minutes in between classes.” Pinnell said the idea of having a
readily available lactation space in each building on campus should not be an unrealistic standard. Gallardo said, in her experience, every working mother has a story about her bra showing a big wet spot from lactation when she’s at work. She said when this happens, it evokes feelings of embarrassment for women even though it’s a normal byproduct of lactation. Gallardo said lactation processes and breastfeeding is something women are recommended to do for up to six months or even a year after giving birth. “I dealt with these kinds of issues myself when my daughter was born,” Gallardo said. “There was nowhere on campus for me to do self care.” She said she went back to work one month after giving birth and had to deal with the pain caused to the breasts because of breastfeeding and she struggled to find places to pump breast milk. “I remember being in Clark Hall in the bathroom, looking around trying to find a place to do this (pump breast milk),” Gallardo said. “I came this close to sitting on the floor next to an electrical outlet to use my breast pump and then I ended up going back to my office, a shared office, which was also awkward because there’s no way to wash up after.” Gallardo said the ideal goal in this call for reform would be receiving more support, from the government or workplaces, enabling women to take care of their family needs and still be able to work. Buyco said this request for lactation spaces will not be an exorbitant cost to the CSU, which is why he believes it is a no-brainer kind of decision. He said so far the CSU board has not been open to discussing various problems like these during bargaining sessions and are not making attempts to engage, work through these issues and problem solve. Gallardo said she also believes
this should be a no-brainer decision and she does not understand how there could be hesitation in resolving this problem. “It’s such a simple thing to do, just to provide an additional space to enable faculty to be better parents and to accommodate them in the workplace,” Gallardo said. She said this seems like a simple move for the CSU to make in providing a more accessible workplace for parents. “If evolution and change is part of college life, then what’s wrong here?” Pinnell said. “This has to be considered, this has to be implemented. We’ve got female students, we’ve got women who are teachers and staff, this would be something that most people would think of as basic.” She said mindful spaces like these were probably not considered essential 60 years ago or at whatever time these CSU universities were established. “It’s the 21st century, it’s time to come around,” Pinnell said. Pinnell said the next steps in the process are waiting to see if the creation of clean and safe lactation spaces is approved by the CSU board in the contract and then the implementation process could begin from campus to campus. Buyco said this matter relates to the fact that faculty and professors, in his opinion, go above and beyond for their job and students. He said they (professors) make many sacrifices, sometimes involving their own health. “This is a recognition that we don’t want to sacrifice our own children,” Buyco said. “We want CSU to recognize that we have children and we want to be able to provide happy and healthy lives for them.”
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