Labor group to set up 128 nursing rooms

The Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions plans to establish 128 nursing rooms in office towers, shopping malls and other public buildings across the city this year to support working mothers, the labor organization said Sunday.

The nursing rooms aim to provide breast-feeding mothers with a private, clean and convenient place to nurse their infant children or pump breast milk, said Shao Xinyu, vice director of the federation's Department of Female Employees.

Many working mothers find it inconvenient and potentially embarrassing to breast-feed or use breast pumps at the office as private rooms can be hard to come by. In offices without nursing rooms, mothers often do it in dingy bathrooms, Shao said. Others go to conference rooms, where they risk embarrassment with their colleagues popping in and out.

There were 240,000 working women in Shanghai who got pregnant in 2012. Shao said most of them will return to work. Because the city is in the midst of a baby boom, the number is only likely to increase.

The Catic Building was the first office building in Jing'an district to set up a nursing room. In Huangpu district, there are 10 nursing rooms in office buildings such as the Meixin Building and at big companies such as Sony.

The building usually donates the space for the nursing room, Shao said. The federation then pays for the upkeep of the room, which is handled by the building's property management company.

The federation aims to set up a nursing room in all of the city's districts and counties this year, Shao said. Over the next three to five years, it aims to increase that number to 1,000, including in public places like shopping malls and airports.

Besides being more nutritious than formula, breast milk does more to bolster an infant's immune system, said Qin Yan, a doctor at the Shanghai First Maternity and Infant Hospital. Establishing more places for mothers to nurse will encourage the practice.

When the number of nursing rooms reaches 200 to 300, the federation plans to develop a mobile phone application to help mothers out with their children find the nearest nursing room, Shao said.

The federation came up with the idea for the application after officials learned that many mothers were sharing the locations of nursing rooms via chat applications and microblogs, Shao said.