Pregnant Fiancé Not Allowed To Sit At Her Teacher Job Plus Wage Theft Location: Georgia

Location: Georgia

have 1 question about my fiancé’s job and accommodating her pregnancy and 1 question about the legality of what I believe is wage theft.

The first is about the pregnancy. My fiancé does have physical health issues along with this pregnancy which makes it where she has to sit sometimes to take a break from standing from shortness of breath and the fact that she’s in general - pregnant. She works as a teacher at a Pre-K /daycare with quite a lot of employees/students/toddlers and children. They recently took all the chairs out of the classrooms and told their teachers the reasoning is because teachers were sitting while teaching and not engaging with the students. The specific reason is because of eye contact, thus she is expected to actually sit in the floor and be level with the kids and teach. She asked if she could be accommodated because she pregnant mixed with her health and they told her specifically she cannot sit in a chair in the classroom.

I know there was a law passed in 2022 that pregnant women are protected for accommodations like this. But I don’t know what steps to take to “force” them to accommodate her, or if they would even be required to.

The second question is what I believe is wage theft. For the past 3 months she clocks in a bit early from lunch (talking 10 mins or so) which the guidelines/handbook state is absolutely allowed. Behind her back they have been going in and changing her times to where it looks like she takes a whole hour. So everyday she essentially works 10 mins for free. When she brought this up they claimed they are in fact allowed to this. Mind you they never told her about this until she finally caught on to them doing this. They then proceeded to update their guideline/handbook the following day to include that employees must take an hour lunch and that they can change your hours to reflect this. To me I believe they can reprimand her for doing this and tell her she cannot do this but they cannot straight up go in and “steal” her hours when she is in the classroom working for those 10 minutes. This adds up to a lot of money over multiple months as well. Since then she now takes a full hour of lunch because they will adjust her time regardless, so she’d might as well and because it is now their stated policy.

We’ve reached out to the department of labor about this and we were told they’d look into. We got mail from them saying they aren’t looking into it further because they get 30’000 complaints a year (or something along those lines, I don’t remember exactly what it said). So my next question is, is this legal? Are they allowed to do this? And is there anything else I can do about this or is she just unfortunately kind of screwed?

I thank anyone who takes the time read any of this and answer. Thank you guys.