Babies in the Workplace

there, unless the store is negligent or otherwise responsible for creating a dangerous condition that causes the harm to the child.

The same rules seem to apply to a business that allows parents to care for their babies on the premises. If the company does not take on the task of caring for the child, their responsibility seems to be pretty well limited to ensuring that there are no dangerous conditions on the premises. This is something that a responsible business would already be doing for its employees. If crawling babies or walking toddlers are allowed on the premises, this creates different risks for the children and the company (since these children would be at risk from things like computer cords that wouldn't normally present a risk for employees). But setting a not-yet-crawling limitation on the program (as did most of the companies) goes a long way toward solving this issue.

attorney, prepared written policies outlining these parameters and other aspects of the baby programs. Some companies also had a waiver prepared that each parent was required to sign before bringing in a baby.

Several decision-makers at these companies said that, according to their attorney, letting a baby come to work under the care of the parent was like a parent taking a child to a grocery store.

Susan Matthews of Borshoff explained that she uses a document written by her attorneys that relieves the company and other employees of liability for the baby. She used the analogy that, if you take your baby to the store, the store has the responsibility not to, for example, let shelving fall onto you or your baby, but they are not responsible for taking care of your baby aside from that sort of thing. The grocery store is not responsible if a baby gets hurt while a parent is shopping