Star Tribune
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.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
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