Vox: All Posts by Alexia Fernández Campbellhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2020-07-28T05:05:00-04:00https://www.vox.com/authors/alexia-fernandez-campbell/rss2020-07-28T05:05:00-04:002020-07-28T05:05:00-04:00A small federal agency focused on preventing industrial disasters is on life support. Trump wants it gone.
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<figcaption>Christina Animashaun/Vox</figcaption>
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<p>The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is without enough voting members, and its investigations are stuck in limbo.</p> <p id="3dgR8J"></p>
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<p id="lrDEXv">It was late in the second shift when workers at a silicone factory in Illinois noticed something had gone wrong. A tank of silicon hydride, used to make water repellent, started foaming and hissing. An operator mixing the chemicals in the tank yelled in frustration. Two of his coworkers came running. A pale yellow haze filled the air. It was hot. None of this was normal.</p>
<p id="WC5kwA">A supervisor quickly ordered one worker to turn on the exhaust fans and another to open the building’s garage doors, but neither got the chance. Within seconds, the 30,000-square-foot building exploded, rattling homes and businesses within 20 miles of the Waukegan, Illinois, factory. Rescue crews had to sift through the rubble for four days to find each of the bodies.</p>
<p id="WxW3VJ">Four workers died the night of May 3, 2019, at <a href="https://www.andisil.com">AB Specialty Silicones</a>, including the chemical operator and his boss. Yet the public may never find out what went wrong, and other chemical companies may never learn how to prevent a similar blast. That’s because the small, independent federal agency that investigates chemical disasters is on life support, and the Trump administration wants it to disappear altogether.</p>
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<cite>Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Emergency personnel and law enforcement search and clear the scene of an explosion at AB Specialty Silicones chemical plant on May 4, 2019, in Waukegan, Illinois. </figcaption>
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<cite>Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A crew walks through the debris. A final report of an investigation into the explosion, which killed four workers, cannot be released as long as the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is short on members.</figcaption>
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<p id="hc5kbv">That agency, the <a href="https://www.csb.gov">Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board</a>, investigates accidents and makes recommendations — but it doesn’t regulate the industry. Since 1998, it has looked into some of the nation’s biggest industrial disasters, including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, which killed 11 workers and dumped an estimated 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico; and the 2005 explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, that killed 15 workers and injured 180. The board’s work has led to changes in industry practices from Texas to Kansas and laws in states from Mississippi to Connecticut.</p>
<p id="IBMPNn">It’s likely, however, that when the investigation into the <a href="https://www.andisil.com/">AB Specialty Silicones</a> explosion wraps up, the board will not be able to meet the quorum needed to vet and approve investigators’ findings and recommendations. Since May 2, it has been operating with only one voting member out of a possible five — one vote short of a quorum. It’s been effectively disabled.</p>
<p id="2w3d5S">The White House hasn’t announced plans to fill the board’s four vacant seats. In fact, President Donald Trump has been trying to do the opposite, pushing to eliminate the board in each of his annual budget proposals — though he hasn’t persuaded Congress to defund it.</p>
<p id="BJX26W">Without a quorum, the board will not be able to release the final reports from any of its 13 pending investigations.</p>
<p id="e4tQt8">The situation creates “a very difficult challenge,” Rick Engler, whose term on the board ended in February, told the <a href="https://publicintegrity.org/">Center for Public Integrity</a>. “We continue to have chemical disasters, and the [board’s] recommendations save lives.”</p>
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<p id="6IdZe5">The inspector general at the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/">US Environmental Protection Agency</a>, which oversees the board, <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2020-07/documents/_epaoig_20200706-20-n-2018.pdf">recently called</a> the situation a matter of “elevated urgency.”</p>
<p id="ag2BUN">“Having only one member impairs the function of the [board],” the inspector general’s July report stated.</p>
<p id="kGQ24H">The White House did not respond to a request for comment.</p>
<p id="lRcn5W">The board’s undoing reflects a broader dysfunction at federal agencies under Trump’s watch. The president has repeatedly failed to appoint leaders at agencies he considers unnecessary, making it nearly impossible for some to operate.</p>
<p id="iFAdIM">That’s happened, for example, at the <a href="https://www.fec.gov/">Federal Election Commission</a>. For nine months, the FEC didn’t have enough commissioners to take key enforcement actions, such as reviewing possible campaign finance violations. The <a href="https://www.mspb.gov/FAQs_Absence_of_Board_Quorum_March_1_2019.pdf">US Merit Systems Protection Board</a>, meanwhile, hasn’t had any board member since February 2019, and is unable to review workplace complaints from federal employees.</p>
<p id="80d6Nb">Unlike the FEC and the <a href="https://www.mspb.gov">Merit Systems Protection Board</a>, however, the Chemical Safety Board’s work is a matter of life and death. Millions of people in America — mostly workers, but also members of the public — are at risk from fires, explosions, or chemical releases, and many of them probably don’t realize it.</p>
<h3 id="26Fj6K"><strong>Things can go very wrong, very quickly</strong></h3>
<p id="TSTliC">The United States is among the world’s top chemical producers. More than 12,000 facilities handle toxic or flammable chemicals, used to make everything from pharmaceuticals to fertilizers, and are often located near businesses and residential areas. The <a href="http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/557127-crs-rmp-update-11-16-12.html">Congressional Research Service</a> found that 90 of these facilities each put a million or more people at risk from accidents in worst-case scenarios. As of 2014, about 4.6 million children attend school within a mile of a chemical plant, according to the <a href="https://www.foreffectivegov.org/blog/interactive-map-students-others-risk-hazardous-chemical-facilities">Center for Effective Government</a>.</p>
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<cite>Giles Clarke/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Chemical plants and factories, seen in 2013, line the roads and suburbs of the area known as “Cancer Alley” in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.</figcaption>
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<p id="MngLlq">The <a href="https://www.csb.gov/about-the-csb/">Chemical Safety Board</a> sends investigators to places like Atchison, Kansas, where 800 middle and high school students in 2016 were evacuated from class after a greenish-yellow cloud of chlorine escaped from a factory that distills alcohol and corn oil. Its final report pinpointed the cause of the accident (a tanker truck driver delivering sulfuric acid mistakenly mixed it with sodium hypochlorite — bleach) and made recommendations to the factory’s owner (such as installing alarms to keep workers from opening the wrong valve, as happened in this case). The owner ultimately followed all the recommendations and made changes to factory practices.</p>
<p id="Ky2o8k">The board’s work has also led to broader reforms. Its 2010 investigation into a deadly explosion at a Connecticut construction site, for example, prompted the state to ban companies from using pressurized natural gas to clean pipes, a process known as gas blowing. Its recommendations also strengthened New York City’s fire code and raised safety standards at oil and gas sites in one Mississippi county.</p>
<p id="QeOVZD">“The CSB’s findings are very influential,” Chris Jahn, president of the <a href="https://www.americanchemistry.com">American Chemistry Council</a>, a trade group that represents the chemical industry, said at a Senate hearing in January. He urged the Trump administration and the Senate to quickly fill the board’s four vacant seats.</p>
<p id="6JaTEu">The council has criticized <a href="https://www.americanchemistry.com/Trade-Assoc-Letter-Urging-Congress-to-Act-on-RMP-Rule.pdf">some of the board’s recommendations</a>, particularly those that call for <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=CSB-2019-0004-0050">more industry regulation</a>. Jahn’s testimony on the importance of the board reflects the depth of support for keeping it alive.</p>
<p id="zKl41c">Labor unions also want to see the board survive. “This is a critical agency for us,” said Mike Wright, director of safety, health, and environment for <a href="https://www.usw.org/act/activism/health-safety-and-environment">United Steelworkers</a>, which represents more than 570,000 workers in some of the nation’s most hazardous industries. “Their reports have helped us improve safety at many plants.”</p>
<p id="cgywSH">But the unfolding crisis has slowed the board’s work to a crawl. Until a new voting member is appointed and confirmed, pending investigations are stuck in limbo, bringing into question whether companies will learn how to prevent fatal explosions, similar to the ones that destroyed a <a href="https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/20/csb_didion_factual_eng06.pdf?16230">Wisconsin corn mill</a> and a <a href="https://www.csb.gov/kmco-llc-fatal-fire-and-explosion-/">chemical factory</a> in Crosby, Texas.</p>
<p id="LxtD2E">More than a year after the AB Specialty Silicones explosion, the board’s investigators are still sifting through evidence to pinpoint the cause.</p>
<p id="d4xTdq">A separate investigation by the <a href="https://www.osha.gov">US Occupational Safety and Health Administration</a> found several safety violations at the factory. According to OSHA, the electrical equipment was improperly installed, and workers were moving flammable liquids on forklifts that ran on propane, which could ignite the chemicals.</p>
<p id="fznjcE">OSHA cited the company for 12 “willful” safety violations and proposed $1.6 million in fines. The company is contesting the citations.</p>
<p id="78ot6c">In a statement to Public Integrity, a company spokesperson said the scope of the OSHA report went “beyond the elements that may have contributed to the tragic explosion” and noted that a third-party investigator AB Specialty Silicones hired traced the explosion to a “human error that resulted in the mistaken addition of an erroneous ingredient.”</p>
<p id="d25Dda">“We look forward to CSB’s more comprehensive work on the cause of the tragedy that has made such an impact on our AB family and our Waukegan community,” the statement said.</p>
<p id="1FzB0b">But a spokesperson for the board said the investigation will take some time — unlikely to be completed until fiscal year 2021.</p>
<h3 id="X7521e"><strong>Lives and homes destroyed</strong></h3>
<p id="diACnJ">The board is also still investigating a factory explosion in Houston that killed two people and damaged hundreds of homes. The January 24 blast at <a href="http://www.watsongrinding.com">Watson Grinding and Manufacturing</a> lit up the night sky and flung debris into nearby neighborhoods, injuring dozens of people. One of them was Sean Rangel, who had worked at the factory for seven years. The 38-year-old welder was parking his pickup truck outside the factory when the blast ignited. </p>
<p id="5mCbXc">As he backed into a parking spot, Rangel saw one of his supervisors, Frank Flores, walking toward the building’s front door, then saw a flash of light in his rearview mirror. The explosion flipped over Rangel’s Dodge Ram and shattered its windows.</p>
<p id="iSfryT">“I thought I got hit by a truck, but my ears were ringing,” Rangel said by phone. He crawled out of the truck and surveyed the scene. “The building wasn’t there anymore; all I could see was metal. At that moment, I knew that Frankie didn’t make it.”</p>
<p id="a05K2J">Flores was one of two workers killed that morning. If Rangel had arrived at work 30 seconds earlier, he might have died, too. The force of the explosion popped his left eardrum and cut his left eye; he was otherwise unhurt. The trauma, however, has stayed with him.</p>
<p id="wqJSkf">“I can’t sleep,” Rangel said. “I’m scared to go places. I don’t know the next time something might happen.”</p>
<p id="X3bTeq">Rangel and his coworkers lost their jobs when Watson filed for bankruptcy a few weeks after the explosion. Now he’s suing the company for negligence. Watson also faces a class-action lawsuit from more than 200 homeowners whose properties were damaged. A lawyer representing the company did not respond to a request for comment. In court filings, company representatives denied the allegations from Rangel and homeowners.</p>
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<cite>Tharindu Nallaperuma/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A warehouse damaged after an explosion at Watson Grinding & Manufacturing in Houston, Texas, seen on January 24, 2020.</figcaption>
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<cite>Tharindu Nallaperuma/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Rubble and debris on the street. The explosion killed two people and damaged hundreds of homes.</figcaption>
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<p id="3U0Gdo">Rangel suspects a gas leak triggered the explosion, but no one knows for sure. The <a href="https://www.csb.gov/about-the-csb/">Chemical Safety Board</a> sent investigators to the scene on the day of the explosion, but they have yet to complete their investigation.</p>
<p id="x5eCXu">The board’s investigative process is not much different from that of the <a href="https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/default.aspx">National Transportation Safety Board</a>, which investigates high-profile transportation accidents, such as the helicopter crash that killed former NBA star Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and seven others near Los Angeles in January. </p>
<p id="6lKNoV">But the NTSB dwarfs its younger cousin. It has a staff of about 400 and an annual budget of $110 million. The Chemical Safety Board has a staff of 40 — including nine investigators — and a $12 million budget, forcing it to concentrate on the worst industrial disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion.</p>
<p id="ItB3Jj">The need for more investigators is clear: The board’s database shows an annual average of 183 chemical accidents that killed, injured, or sickened someone over the past decade.</p>
<p id="iVIwOw">However, each year, investigators are only able to look into about five major accidents. Their findings and recommendations are then vetted by the board’s voting members, and, if approved, a final report is released publicly.</p>
<p id="sRs0fr">While the board’s findings have led to stricter regulations and practices, it’s also not unusual for industry groups and companies to reject the board’s findings and recommendations. The oil and gas industry — which, <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/industries/donald-trump?id=N00023864">according to the Center for Responsive Politics</a>, has contributed about $2 million to Trump’s reelection campaign — <a href="https://www.api.org/~/media/files/oil-and-natural-gas/offshore/bsee-wcr-economic-one-pager.pdf">has pushed back</a> against a recommendation for new federal rules that would require oil rigs and refineries to meet stricter safety standards. The industry’s main trade group, <a href="https://www.api.org/~/media/files/oil-and-natural-gas/offshore/bsee-wcr-economic-one-pager.pdf">the American Petroleum Institute</a>, opposed the rules, saying they would cost companies too much money without improving safety or lessening environmental risks.</p>
<p id="biwl9w">The chemical and oil industries <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2019-06/documents/rmp_coalition_rmp_reconsideration_petition_508.pdf">also fought an EPA rule</a>, issued at the end of the Obama administration, that among other things would have required companies to conduct independent audits of major chemical accidents — something the board recommended. The Trump EPA eliminated this provision, along with others, last year.</p>
<h3 id="tgjlew"><strong>A prominent opponent</strong></h3>
<p id="3TVZ66">No stakeholder has worked harder to weaken the board than Trump’s White House, which has tried to shut the board down four times.</p>
<p id="6uLXxO">The administration first announced its intention to defund the board in Trump’s budget proposal in 2017, arguing that the board’s work overlapped with other agencies and has generated “unhelpful friction” between them. The White House said the board’s push for regulatory changes had “frustrated” businesses and even some regulators, though it did not specify what the friction was about.</p>
<p id="e139Qs">This did not sit well with the steelworkers union and other board supporters.</p>
<p id="xCtlvP">“It was infuriating,” Wright said. “A lot of the things that are getting people killed are not addressed” by regulatory agencies such as OSHA.</p>
<p id="FvNMBu">The board had just emerged from a rough period when Trump announced his intention to eliminate it. Complaints about board mismanagement triggered two House investigations in 2014 and criticism from the EPA’s inspector general. The board’s chair at the time, Rafael Moure-Eraso, resigned under pressure in 2015 amid complaints of mismanagement. In the years that followed, Vanessa Allen Sutherland, the new chair, revamped the board, turning around investigations more quickly and improving morale. But she left in 2018 to take a job at a railroad company.</p>
<p id="Jt4D35">In the end, Trump’s plan to defund the board has proven unsuccessful: Congress has voted to fund it every year.</p>
<p id="TlAHok">But the board now faces an existential crisis. The last three members left because their five-year terms had expired or were about to end. In their place, the White House has nominated only one member: Katherine Lemos, who previously worked at the NTSB and the <a href="https://www.faa.gov">Federal Aviation Administration</a>.</p>
<p id="9Y1X3L">Members of the Senate’s <a href="https://www.epw.senate.gov">Environment and Public Works Committee</a> voted unanimously to confirm Lemos in September, but Senate leaders didn’t move forward with a full vote in the chamber for months.</p>
<p id="TR7U9w">“This is completely unacceptable,” committee chair Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said during a January hearing. “It’s in everyone’s interest to keep the board functioning.”</p>
<p id="CriN0W">Lemos’s confirmation was finally pushed through in March, right as Kristen Kulinowski — the only member left at the board at the time — was preparing to take another job as her term ended.</p>
<p id="gQigPp">Lemos joined the board at the end of April. For the first time in months, the board had two members — albeit for one week.</p>
<h3 id="lqcsb1"><strong>The last woman standing</strong></h3>
<p id="Ny5Usz">On April 29, the board held its quarterly meeting in a small conference room two blocks from the White House. Lemos, Kulinowski, and the board’s attorney sat behind a long table.</p>
<p id="ieytM3">It was Kulinowski’s last meeting on the board and Lemos’s first.</p>
<p id="QdSmnP">Kulinowski updated Lemos, who would succeed her as the board’s chair on the 13 pending investigations she was leaving behind. Kulinowski said investigators are still reviewing evidence from the blast at AB Specialty Silicones and the factory explosion in Houston. She said two investigations were put on hold because the board doesn’t have enough staff.</p>
<p id="8dI6Yx">No one mentioned that once Kulinowski departs, Lemos wouldn’t be able to vote to close the investigations.</p>
<p id="epRWpR">Kulinowski, who now leads the federally funded <a href="https://www.ida.org/en/ida-ffrdcs/science-and-technology-policy-institute">IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute</a>, told Public Integrity the board wasn’t designed to function with so many empty seats. Yet she rejected the notion that its death is imminent.</p>
<p id="yPtA7x">“The CSB has such an important mission, and we survived so many threats to our existence while I was there and even before I arrived,” she said.</p>
<p id="YoIopS">At the April meeting, Kevin Druley, an editor at the <a href="https://www.nsc.org/weblogin?returnurl=%2f">National Safety Council</a>, an Illinois-based nonprofit that promotes public safety, asked how the board would operate with just one member.</p>
<p id="YzZalB">“That’s an excellent question,” Lemos responded, adding that she didn’t have any information to provide. “But we are working through those details.”</p>
<p id="qe4Yw3">Those details were still unresolved when Kulinowski left the board two days later.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/28/21336481/chemical-safety-hazard-investigation-boardAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-12-10T08:30:00-05:002019-12-10T08:30:00-05:00Meet the women suing America’s biggest companies over equal pay
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<figcaption>Allison Gamba is suing her former employer, Goldman Sachs, with two other women. They accuse the firm of systematically paying women less than men. | Hannah Yoon for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>A spate of lawsuits against giants from Google and Twitter to Nike and Goldman Sachs reveals the growing frustrations of professional women in pursuit of the C-suite. </p> <p id="5BsWqu"></p>
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<p id="D0GXWs">Allison Gamba thought she had done everything right. </p>
<p id="nM1k7Y">She went to business school. She snagged a coveted seat at the New York Stock Exchange. She regularly turned mediocre stocks into top-performing investments for Goldman Sachs. She networked, she schmoozed, she even learned to golf — whatever it took to break into the insular boys club of investment banking.</p>
<p id="UeuxGf">So when Gamba read a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-11-17/goldman-sachs-promotes-110-to-partner-as-wall-street-rebounds-from-crisis">Bloomberg article</a> about the latest round of promotions at Goldman Sachs in 2010, she was devastated to see her name missing from the list. At 35, she had put in nine years at the company. She later pulled her boss aside on the trading floor and asked him if he had nominated her for managing director.</p>
<p id="H6R1dP">He hadn’t.</p>
<p id="XgSg5g">“I would have been a laughing stock if I had nominated you,” she says he told her.</p>
<p id="eKeOmE">Gamba was furious. At that moment, she says,<strong> </strong>she realized how pointless it all was. It didn’t matter that, a year earlier, she generated a department record of $9.5 million from the low-performing stocks her boss assigned to her. It didn’t matter that she was already doing the job of a managing director, overseeing 15 other traders at the New York Stock Exchange. It didn’t even matter that she was one of the top performers in the equities department. She would never be a managing director at Goldman Sachs, she thought. No woman in her division had ever gotten that far.</p>
<p id="1y5Z20">“I just knew I wasn’t going to get promoted anymore. My head was up against the glass ceiling,” Gamba told Vox by phone from her home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The now-43-year-old former stock trader believes she was penalized for being a woman and a mother who had taken maternity leave twice. Gamba said she later watched as a male colleague was promoted to managing director, even though, she says, he generated less revenue for the firm than she did. In the years that followed, Gamba watched other men bypass her, too. They were essentially paid twice as much to do the same job she was already doing, she says, and everyone knew it. </p>
<p id="dJxZRx">Gamba didn’t leave quietly, though. She went to court. She joined two other women in a class action lawsuit against Goldman Sachs in 2013. The lawsuit, which represents 3,000 other women who worked or currently work at the company,<strong> </strong>accuses the firm of systematically paying women less than men for doing the same work, a form of gender discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. </p>
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<cite>Hannah Yoon for Vox</cite>
<figcaption>“I just knew I wasn’t going to get promoted anymore. My head was up against the glass ceiling,” Gamba says.</figcaption>
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<p id="UEu69D">“Goldman Sachs denies the allegations in the lawsuit and is aggressively contesting the class claims,” a company spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. Both sides are preparing for trial.</p>
<p id="kMo8OO">Goldman Sachs is one of several<strong> </strong>major American companies being sued by more than two dozen women for equal pay in lawsuits that cut across a wide swath of industries. Most of these women are fighting for high-level leadership roles long held by men, and they’re accusing companies including Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Disney, and Nike of paying women less than men or passing them over for promotions.</p>
<p id="nNj7Tp">Vox spoke with several of these women and reviewed hundreds of pages of court files related to cases of equal pay and gender discrimination. Despite the differences in their work, the women’s stories were largely the same: Their careers reportedly stalled when they reached a certain level in the corporate hierarchy, and if they complained about it, they said they were punished for it. They argue the pay gap has put them behind men, perhaps for the rest of their careers.</p>
<p id="k4SzIe">According to court documents, one senior manager in Disney’s music publishing division found out that she was making $25,000 less than the lowest-paid man at her level. She’s been working there for 15 years. A footwear developer at Nike complained to human resources that she was paid far less than men in her position and says the HR manager accused her of “crying wolf.” </p>
<p id="G8wUZE">At Twitter, a software engineer said she was put on indefinite leave after complaining to the CEO about gender bias. (In a statement to Vox, a spokesperson for Disney said the firm has “robust” pay equity policies in place. “The lawsuit’s generalized allegations to the contrary are ill-informed and unfounded, and we look forward to presenting our response to the individual claims in court at the appropriate time.” A spokesperson for Twitter also denied the gender bias allegations. Nike did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.)</p>
<p id="3o9zZa">These cases represent a sea change in equal pay suits, which once were mostly filed on behalf of women working low-wage jobs in the retail industry. In the past ten years, legal experts say they have seen more professional, white-collar women taking employers to court. “It hardly ever happened in the 1990s,” says Kelly Dermody, an employment lawyer representing several of the plaintiffs. “There’s a more robust sense of urgency now to challenge [systemic] misconduct in the workplace.”</p>
<p id="JQWsjc">Experts say part of the reason for this shift is that women are starting to break into the highest-paying corporate jobs (in tech and finance, for example), which have long been held by men. In 1995, none of the Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs; in 2018, there <a href="https://fortune.com/2018/05/21/women-fortune-500-2018/">were 24 women</a> who worked as chief executives in those companies. It’s progress, and yet it’s not at all representative of the gender balance across the Fortune 500 workforce.<strong> </strong>As women continue climbing the corporate ladder, they can see the barriers keeping women out of the C-suite.</p>
<p id="PXpwG9">Women are also more aware of the pay gap now than they were even a few years ago. About a quarter of working women say they’ve been paid less than a man for doing the same job, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/14/gender-discrimination-comes-in-many-forms-for-todays-working-women/">according to a 2017 Pew Research</a> survey. That’s more than double the share of women who said the same thing <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/chapter-4-men-and-women-at-work/">four years earlier</a>. </p>
<p id="QzorVi">So it’s not that the gender pay gap is new: <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-earnings/2017/home.htm#chart1">Women have been making roughly 80 cents</a> for every dollar a man makes for the past 15 years — a disparity that is <a href="http://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/resources/workplace/fair-pay/quantifying-americas-gender-wage-gap.pdf">even larger between women of color and white men</a>. But more women are noticing gender discrimination now. They’re talking more about pay with their colleagues. They’re hearing female coworkers describe similar challenges. And they’re watching other women take legal action, giving them courage to do the same. </p>
<h3 id="Vf0UMc">The wage gap follows women throughout their careers</h3>
<p id="FIBtQq">Kelly Ellis said getting a job at Google was a dream come true.</p>
<p id="yOciYm">The 35-year-old software engineer was hired by the tech company in 2010 to work on products such as Google Plus. During the hiring process, Google asked what she earned as a back-end software engineer for Current TV, where she worked at the time. The company then offered her the same salary. </p>
<p id="OwMTcp">It was a salary level Google<strong> </strong>typically offered to new college graduates (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront">roughly $106,000 a year</a>), according to a lawsuit she filed in December 2017 in San Francisco Superior Court. Yet Ellis had four years of experience working in back-end software engineering, so she qualified for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront">roughly $124,000 a year</a>. </p>
<p id="yBO4s5">A few weeks after starting her job at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, the company hired a male software engineer to join Ellis’s team. In her complaint, she alleges that he<strong> </strong>had less relevant job experience than she did, so Ellis looked up his salary level in the internal employee directory. He was hired at the level above hers, even though he graduated the same year she did and had less experience as a back-end software engineer.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/c3IzQAHyRFidN5Pd0KcQWpf2L80=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19423616/12841379_10156702359000078_6279086147883268961_test.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy of Kelly Ellis</cite>
<figcaption>In her lawsuit against Google, Kelly Ellis says that she may never catch up to male colleagues after being paid less early in her career.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="ZjBtJG">“I was really unhappy and frustrated and annoyed,” Ellis said by phone from the Bay Area. After six months, she asked for a promotion. In her complaint, she alleges that she was told it was too soon. </p>
<p id="xWTzYJ">Google did not respond to a request for comment from Vox, and the company did not specifically address Ellis’s allegations in court documents. </p>
<p id="b6CTen">“Women see pay discrimination the moment they enter the workforce,” says Shannon Williams, who leads the equal pay campaign for the nonprofit group Equal Rights Advocates. A <a href="https://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings-of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf">2013 study</a> by the American Association of University Women found that women get paid 6.6 percent less than men in their first jobs, even after considering factors such as job location, occupation, college major, and number of hours worked. That sets them up to make less money for years to come.</p>
<p id="DJbIdV">One of the main reasons the pay gap is so persistent, according to experts, is the routine practice of asking job applicants about their salary history.</p>
<p id="nvkNPW">Businesses often decide what to pay new hires based partly (<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17219158/equal-pay-day-2018">or entirely</a>) on how much they earned at their last jobs. Because women are <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained">generally paid less</a> than their male coworkers, for reasons that include gender discrimination, asking female job candidates about their past salaries nearly guarantees that the wage disparity will continue throughout their careers. </p>
<p id="aC4VxP">Ellis was eventually promoted to a level 4 and then a level 5 engineer, but says<strong> </strong>she was always a step behind the man who’d gotten a head start. </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Kelly Ellis’s complaint against Google alleges that she was eventually promoted, but by that point, her male colleagues were ahead, “ensuring that she would never catch up on the gender pay gap.”" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QSy8MBwcrcV1BLLM4Z-9dzb55e8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19410662/doc01_final.jpg">
<cite>Amanda Northrop/Vox</cite>
<figcaption>An excerpt from the complaint against Google filed by Kelly Ellis and other plaintiffs. </figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="m4KdZ7">Ellis eventually left Google for a job at Medium in 2014. She suspected at the time that she was treated differently at Google because she was a woman, but she wasn’t certain. It wasn’t until 2017 that she realized her experience might not be unique. </p>
<p id="lpgM8s">The US Department of Labor’s 2017 audit of Google found “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit">systemic compensation disparities against women</a>” across the entire company. Ellis also learned of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html">a spreadsheet</a> that Google employees had created for men and women to share their salaries. Though it reflected only 2 percent of the workforce, it showed women made less at almost every level. </p>
<p id="LC7Tim">“I realized how massive the discrimination really was,” Ellis said. So she agreed to join a lawsuit with three other Google employees later that year. Though Google did not respond to Vox’s inquiry about the lawsuit, the company <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/11/google-says-its-own-analysis-shows-no-gender-pay-gap/">has denied gender bias allegations</a> in the past. In March, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-pay-gap.html">the company said</a> an internal pay study showed that men were actually paid less than women; the study did not check whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications, as Ellis alleges.</p>
<p id="yijrgI">Ellis and the other plaintiffs are in the process of gathering evidence to get class action status for their case, allowing them to seek compensation and damages for up to 8,200 other women who have worked or currently work at Google in similar positions. </p>
<p id="2g6d44">“I’m not the type of person who likes to back down,” Ellis said. </p>
<h3 id="eeWy8W">Promotions elude women, even when they ask</h3>
<p id="FaYqPy">It’s widely believed that women make less than men because they don’t negotiate for higher salaries as often as men do. While older <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w18511.pdf">research</a> supports this idea, things have changed.</p>
<p id="zGNFCA">New research suggests that women <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/06/research-women-ask-for-raises-as-often-as-men-but-are-less-likely-to-get-them">do negotiate for raises and promotions as often as men</a>, but they are less likely to get them. And often, they <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/9/29/13096310/wage-gap-women-negotiate-lean-in">are penalized</a> for asking.</p>
<p id="qxSVOM">“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked for promotions and been turned down,” Holly Muenchow, a software developer at Microsoft, told Vox.</p>
<p id="GpizZK">Muenchow, 39, has been working at the tech giant for 17 years and is one of three women suing the company for equal pay. She is arguing that Microsoft has created a hostile culture toward women. </p>
<p id="gGMAEh">Muenchow alleges that managers expect women to conform to certain gender stereotypes by policing their tone of voice, according to documents filed in federal court in 2016 in Washington state. Women who work at the company are often labeled as “too aggressive” when they speak up in meetings, the court filings claim, but men are allowed to “routinely interrupt or talk over women without criticism.” </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RjsxUS8PuvmJvYn6Y8DQpDtaXHI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19410663/doc02_final.jpg">
<cite>Amanda Northrop/Vox</cite>
<figcaption>According to court filings, Holly Muenchow, a software developer at Microsoft, accused her employer of encouraging women “to be more of a cheerleader.” She also says the company paid her less than male colleagues for similar work.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="uyV7nB">This kind of bias, Muenchow alleges, has led to negative feedback from her supervisors, and her achievements are not recognized as often as those of her male colleagues. She hasn't gotten a promotion in years, according to her lawsuit, and yet she’s watched men with similar qualifications advance far beyond her.</p>
<p id="K8P3K5">“It has affected my morale,” Muenchow says. “Being undervalued and passed over for promotion when peers get appreciated and advanced is hard and depressing.”</p>
<p id="M8rcjQ">She says that forming a women’s group in her division opened her eyes. The women talked about all the ways they believe they’ve been treated differently from the men on their teams. </p>
<p id="QVsALe">One coworker said she’d pushed for a promotion after returning from maternity leave, but her manager told her he didn’t want to “waste” a promotion on her, in case she became pregnant again, according to court filings. Another employee said she’d asked about a promotion but “was told repeatedly that it was not possible” because it was rare for anyone to reach the next level. She<strong> </strong>alleges that she stayed in the same job for six years while several men were bumped up.</p>
<p id="BhvfhI">Talking about compensation with coworkers is one of the few ways to discover patterns of potential gender discrimination, says Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. </p>
<p id="qesmqV"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-more-open-discussing-money-finances-than-boomers-2019-10">Survey</a> after <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2017/10/18/millennials-sharing-salary-information-equal-pay/">survey</a> shows that millennials are much more open about their salaries than older generations. For example, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-more-open-discussing-money-finances-than-boomers-2019-10">an October survey</a> by Business Insider and Morning Consult found that millennials are six times more likely to talk about money with their coworkers than baby boomers are. </p>
<p id="brwxVS">“It seems that we as a culture are moving toward greater transparency around pay,” Martin told me. “Young people are more likely to understand and identify pay secrecy as a destructive force that makes it harder to ensure equal pay and fair pay.”</p>
<p id="yanJeY">Some of these lawsuits came before the Me Too movement, but the movement itself was born out of decades of women’s frustrations around not being heard or taken seriously at work. Me Too has only helped further conversations about equal pay.</p>
<p id="PU0SO0">According to <a href="http://microsoftgendercase.com/wp-content/uploads/Microsoft_Gender_Second_Amended_Complaint.pdf">documents made public</a> as part of the court case, female Microsoft employees filed 118 internal complaints about gender bias between 2010 and 2016. The company only considered one of them to have any merit.</p>
<p id="p3m5Eq">In 2016, Muenchow joined two of her colleagues in suing Microsoft for gender discrimination under the federal Civil Rights Act.</p>
<p id="Cmxzu6">A spokesperson for Microsoft told Vox there’s no bias in the company’s pay or promotion practices. “The District Court Judge carefully considered the plaintiffs’ arguments on class certification and rejected them. We remain committed to increasing diversity and making sure that Microsoft is a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed,” the company said in a statement.</p>
<p id="PWymMn">Another company representative also noted that not all women at Microsoft feel overlooked. More than a dozen women gave court statements in the company’s defense, saying they’ve never witnessed or experienced such discrimination. Nine other women, however, have come forward to back up the plaintiffs’ claims.</p>
<p id="rTx40d">In June 2018, the judge overseeing the case nonetheless<strong> </strong>denied the plaintiffs’ request for class action status, saying they did not show enough evidence that the problems were widespread. Muenchow and the other women named in the suit are appealing the decision.</p>
<h3 id="fo2oeF">Punished for complaining</h3>
<p id="8n7ktk">Several of the women suing Microsoft, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, and Nike claim that they were punished for reporting the alleged gender bias. Retaliating against an employee for reporting discrimination is illegal under federal law.</p>
<p id="blMGmx">Tina Huang, one of Twitter’s first hires, was one of the women who complained, according to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in March 2015. She was brought on in 2009 as a software engineer to work on the mobile product, and by 2011 she was promoted to staff engineer. Then she tried to get a position as a senior staff engineer, a role that would have moved Tina from coding to leadership, giving her access to important meetings where top engineers plan the technical direction of the company. </p>
<p id="uh2kDA"></p>
<p id="xSKXUw">Her manager made the case for her promotion in winter 2013. And it wasn’t a hard case to make — she had glowing performance reviews.</p>
<p id="Z7uK2w">“She has been outstanding — truly better than anyone else on the team,” a manager wrote in one of her performance evaluations.</p>
<p id="2q1mgo">“Her efforts have made a huge difference for growth at Twitter,” read another comment.</p>
<p id="sZ9nrk">Despite all the praise, Huang was denied the promotion without any explanation. She later learned that seven people were moved into the leadership positions, and all were men.</p>
<p id="bSpOPr">Huang emailed Twitter’s then-CEO, Dick Costolo, accusing the company of having an arbitrary promotion process that disadvantages women. The company initiated an investigation immediately and asked her to take paid personal leave during the probe, which was supposed to take about a week. Nearly two weeks later, the investigation was still ongoing and she still hadn’t returned from leave. </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="In a court filing, Huang details how the leave of absence had a detrimental effect on her career." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GqpZz1W2NAJZj5KH9y-0K_wn3Ks=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19410665/doc03_final.jpg">
<cite>Amanda Northrop/Vox</cite>
<figcaption>Tina Huang, a former Twitter engineer, said in court filings that she was placed on “personal leave” after complaining about how promotions were doled out.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="DVfMEv">Huang said she was removed from her projects<strong> </strong>because of the extended leave. </p>
<p id="r4WqbL">Twitter never communicated the result of its investigation to Huang, according to the complaint, and didn’t provide any meaningful options for moving forward. “Ms. Huang was in limbo: she had a job in name only,” the court filing states.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Court documents show Tina Huang arguing that her career was “irreparably derailed.”" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/sHBB4yUSg-96ZSgleFfELiQqM3A=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19410668/doc04_final.jpg">
<cite>Amanda Northrop/Vox</cite>
<figcaption>Huang, who is fighting to have her suit get class action status, also is arguing she felt she had no choice but to leave. Twitter called her appeal “meritless.”</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="5akokq">Huang resigned in 2014. In 2018, the judge overseeing the case denied her request for class action status, which would have allowed Huang to sue on behalf of another 135 female engineers at the company. She is currently appealing the decision. </p>
<p id="ANEB9J">A spokesperson for Twitter called Huang’s appeal “meritless.” “We are deeply committed to an inclusive and diverse workplace, and to the fair and equitable treatment of all our employees. We will continue to vigorously defend against the Plaintiff’s claims,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox.</p>
<p id="OPNLnL">Muenchow’s and Huang’s lawsuits were denied class action status, but they have not lost their cases. Even if an appeals court judge sides with the lower court’s decision, Muenchow and Huang can still sue individually. But they will have to overcome several hurdles to get their case before a jury.</p>
<h3 id="F5dsOq">Dismissed in court</h3>
<p id="CVCEEj">The judges’ decisions in the Microsoft and Twitter cases reflect the legal difficulties women face. There are two main ways women can challenge pay discrimination in federal court, and neither path is easy.</p>
<p id="RvJBz5">One is under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which makes it illegal to underpay women for doing the same job as a man under the same conditions. Legal experts say it’s hard for plaintiffs to show that two jobs are equal, and companies can easily come up with a reason — other than the woman’s gender — to explain the pay difference. Valid reasons include differences in employee performance, seniority, experience, and education. </p>
<p id="c9Q2ye">The other way to challenge the pay gap is through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws job discrimination based on sex, race, religion, and nationality. Underpaying women because of their sex is a form of gender discrimination, and it’s generally easier to prove than discrimination under the Equal Pay Act. The plaintiff doesn’t have to show that she was doing the same job as the men who were paid more. She does, however, have to prove that the reason she was paid less or treated differently was because of her gender or race — a requirement that doesn’t exist under the Equal Pay Act.</p>
<p id="q1c4vW">When women take their cases to court under either law, the chances of getting their claims before a jury are low. That’s because federal judges dismiss job discrimination and equal pay claims at a much higher rate than other civil lawsuits. Only about four out of 100 job discrimination lawsuits that aren’t settled or voluntarily dismissed provide any kind of relief for workers, <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1780235">according to</a> Katie Eyer, a law professor at Rutgers. </p>
<p id="naSqci">This is highly unusual in the world of federal litigation, “exceeding the negative outcomes faced by other litigants in both scope and degree,” she <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1780235">wrote</a> in a 2011 <em>Minnesota Law Review </em>article. In other words, the odds are stacked against victims of discrimination more than victims of medical malpractice or consumer fraud.</p>
<p id="AUNZaA">Deborah Eisenberg, an employment law professor at the University of Maryland, says federal judges have an overly strict view of what “equal work” means under the Equal Pay Act. Her <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2267&context=fac_pubs">research shows</a> that judges throw out about one-third of equal pay cases through summary judgment. Sometimes, judges improperly dismiss lawsuits even when the main facts in the case are disputed, she says. </p>
<p id="GucsIz">“Dismissing equal pay claims at the summary judgment stage is the modus operandi for most federal courts,” she wrote <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2267&context=fac_pubs">in a 2013 research paper</a> published in <em>New York Law School Law Review</em>.</p>
<p id="9AESJK">That’s why some states have passed laws that make it easier for women to prove discrimination. In 2016, California, Massachusetts, and New York passed state laws that don’t require women to prove that they were doing the same job as a man who earned more, as the federal Equal Pay Act does. They just need to show that they were doing similar work — a far lower bar to overcome.</p>
<p id="S9xgGE">Ex-Googler Ellis is suing the company under one such<strong> </strong>statute. Her lawyer, Kelly Dermody, is also representing Gamba and Muenchow in their cases against Goldman Sachs and Microsoft in federal court.</p>
<p id="y23KkJ">Dermody, who is based in San Francisco, has been representing women in gender discrimination cases for 25 years. Her first client in 1994 worked as a cashier at Home Depot. She had a college degree in plant sciences and experience working as a garden manager, but a younger man with no relevant experience was promoted to manage the store’s garden department instead. </p>
<p id="FEEvtb">The complaint turned into a class action lawsuit that Home Depot settled for $87.5 million in 1998. The company reformed its pay and promotion practices, which has put more women in management positions, Dermody says.</p>
<p id="34u6AJ">A few years later, the largest equal pay lawsuit in the US was filed in 2001 by cashiers and retail associates at Walmart. The class action case, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/15/18223752/walmart-gender-discrimination-class-action-lawsuit-2019"><em>Dukes v. Walmart</em></a>, represented 1.5 million employees and made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2011, the justices ruled 5-4 in favor of Walmart, saying that the group of women was too large and that they needed to file smaller lawsuits. Current and former Walmart employees <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/15/18223752/walmart-gender-discrimination-class-action-lawsuit-2019">are still fighting</a> the company in multiple equal pay lawsuits around the country. </p>
<p id="fHgceX">Huang, Gamba, Ellis, Muenchow, and many of the plaintiffs in the latest spate of equal pay cases are not minimum-wage earners at big-box stores. They do not represent the average working woman. They are highly paid professionals in the most lucrative, male-dominated industries. Women are still far more likely to work low-paid jobs, especially if they are women of color. </p>
<p id="mRZk2K">But until recently, women hadn’t reached the C-suite in large numbers. It remains to be seen just how successful the most powerful women in the corporate world will be in tackling wage discrimination.</p>
<h3 id="pA8vfE">Going to court has risks and rewards</h3>
<p id="DNLpkj">It was hard for Allison Gamba to give up her Wall Street career.</p>
<p id="RpC3Rf">She said she knew she wanted to be a stock trader since high school. Her father was a trader, and she found the buzz of the New York Stock Exchange thrilling. She expected that it would be hard to break into the Wall Street boy’s club, but she wasn’t prepared to hit the glass ceiling.</p>
<p id="c1PV3Y">“I knew the deck was stacked against me, but I also felt like I was talented enough to rise to the top,” she told me. “I thought that with my talent and my ambition and work ethic I would get what I deserved.”</p>
<p id="rJfFRg">She was wrong, she said. </p>
<p id="PFNctC">Gamba said she was aware of the risks of going to court. She called it “career suicide,” and said she knew she would never get another job on Wall Street. She tried.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SP5xChBspEUnTfHM5z0aZwrdCrA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19423610/Vox_AllisonGamba_HY15test.jpg">
<cite>Hannah Yoon for Vox</cite>
<figcaption>In 2014, after leaving Goldman Sachs, Gamba went back to school to study interior design and now owns an interior design firm. </figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="TFsvOu">Retaliation against women who report discrimination is not uncommon. More than 34,000 people said they experienced retaliation for reporting discrimination in fiscal year 2018, according to complaints filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Lawyers for the EEOC determined that 15 percent of the claims had merit.</p>
<p id="7ycmzR">Fear of losing a job, or being seen as a difficult employee, often keeps women from taking legal action, experts say.</p>
<p id="NZHA1C">So Gamba switched careers.</p>
<p id="P1jALa">In 2014, she went back to school to study interior design and now owns an interior design firm. Sure, she doesn’t make as much money as she did on Wall Street, but she has no regrets. Allison just hopes that the lawsuit will open the door for other women to make it further than she did.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="4uv2Yc">“I want to make it right for the future,” Allison said. “It’s not about the money, it’s about getting what you deserve and making it a level playing field.”</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="VDD9ak">
<p id="mYlSEn"><a href="https://www.vox.com/authors/alexia-fernandez-campbell"><em>Alexia Fernández Campbell</em></a><em> covered labor issues and workers’ rights for Vox. </em></p>
<p id="aKQii4"><a href="http://www.hannahyoon.com/"><em>Hannah Yoon</em></a><em> is a photographer based in Philadelphia.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/12/3/20948425/equal-pay-lawsuits-pay-gap-glass-ceilingAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-21T00:10:00-05:002019-11-21T00:10:00-05:00It took a debate with all-female moderators to ask Democrats about paid family leave
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<figcaption>Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) former tech executive Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer (right) listen as Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during the Democratic Presidential Debate. | Alex Wong/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The answers weren’t great, but the question mattered.</p> <p id="C2sLEG">On Wednesday, something unheard of happened on the 2020 Democratic debate stage: Moderators asked candidates what they would do about high child care costs and the lack of paid parental leave in the US.</p>
<p id="1dhxxW">It just took five debates and a panel of all-women moderators for this to happen.</p>
<p id="A6SEHj">Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for the Washington Post, pointed out that child care and paid family leave are important issues to many voters.</p>
<p id="JV2dAe">“Here in Georgia, the average price of infant daycare can be as much as $8,500 per child per year. That’s more than in-state tuition at a public college in Georgia. Mr. Yang, what would you do as president to ease that financial burden?” she asked.</p>
<p id="9PyPxa">Yang responded by saying that the US is one of only two countries without mandated paid family leave laws (the other being Papua New Guinea). That’s not entirely true. There are a handful of small countries without it, such as Suriname and Lesotho. But he was pointing to a big problem: The US is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t guarantee new parents paid time off.</p>
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<cite>Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Democratic presidential hopeful tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang speaks during the fifth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season. </figcaption>
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<p id="dtrO3D">His solution? Universal basic income, giving families up to $2,000 a month to spend on child care. Or with the money, a parent could stay home and care for the child, an idea he was eager to push.</p>
<p id="s4YrwU">“We should not be pushing everyone to leave the home and go to the work force,” Yang responded. “Many parents see that tradeoff and say if they leave the home and go to work, they’d be spending all that money on child care anyway. In many cases, it would we better if the parent stayed with the child.”</p>
<p id="Lrb4A8">Parker then turned to Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris.</p>
<p id="329mHf">“Senator Harris, you’re one of the candidates proposing legislation to guarantee up to six months of paid family leave,” she said. “And Senator Klobuchar, you’re one of the candidates proposing up to three months. I want to hear from both of you on this, starting with you, Senator Klobuchar. Why three months?” </p>
<p id="w0BRNI">Klobuchar threw shade at Harris’s proposal, by suggesting that six months of paid family leave would cost the government too much money and that three months is good enough.</p>
<p id="IQtfGL">“We have an obligation as a party to be fiscally responsible,” she answered. “Yes, think big, but make sure we have people’s backs and are honest with them about what we can pay for.”</p>
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<cite>Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) speaks during the Democratic primary debate.</figcaption>
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<p id="YQW36a">Klobuchar is one of several 2020 candidates who endorse Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s signature legislative proposal, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18220998/kirsten-gillibrand-paid-family-leave">the Family Act</a>. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg have, too. That plan provides three months of paid leave to families, with up to 66 percent of each worker’s income covered by a small increase to payroll taxes (paid by workers and employers). Both parents could each use the benefit when they choose to.</p>
<p id="cqL8ha">In October, Harris went even further than her peers and proposed the most generous paid family leave plan yet: six months. That would put the United States in line with most of the world’s developed countries and with what researchers believe to be an ideal amount of time. It would also probably cost a lot of money, and Harris has given few details about how it would be funded. </p>
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<cite>Alex Wong/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during the Democratic Presidential Debate.</figcaption>
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<p id="s417JN">When Parker asked her how she would pay for it, Harris demurred. Instead she focused on the fact that caregiving is a job that usually falls to women, but that three months is not enough time for them to juggle all their responsibilities.</p>
<p id="9dtfyH">“Many women are having to make a very difficult choice about whether they’re going to leave a profession for which they have a passion to care for their family, or whether they’re going to give up a paycheck, which is part of what that family relies on,” she answered. “So six months paid family leave is meant to adjust to the reality of women’s lives today.”</p>
<p id="z1UW5U">Their answers didn’t add much to the debate — but it was the that question mattered. </p>
<h3 id="SPsZ5g">Parental leave is an issue that matters to voters</h3>
<p id="27YrZ4">Six months of paid parental leave may seem radical, but it’s really not. Researchers consider <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/upshot/paid-parental-leave-sweet-spot-six-months-gates.html">six months of paid parental leave</a> ideal to strike a balance between a child’s health care needs and the needs of a parent’s employer.</p>
<p id="uTS1Et">The idea of a government-run program to provide parental leave is also well supported by voters. About <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/04/15/an-overwhelming-majority-of-americans-support-paid-parental-leave/">74 percent</a> of registered US voters in 2016 said the government should require businesses to offer employees paid parental leave. When you break down poll numbers, the support is overwhelming across genders, political parties, and even income groups. </p>
<p id="eQyOC2">Another survey shows that <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/03/23/support-for-paid-leave-policies/">82 percent of voters</a> believe working mothers should get paid maternity leave. Whether the respondent was Republican or Democrat, male or female, it didn’t matter — a majority support the idea that both mothers and fathers should get paid time off. </p>
<p id="wjjyLr">In other words, it’s a safe political issue for Democrats and Republicans to tackle, if only Republicans weren’t so hesitant to make businesses pay part — or all — of the cost. Right now, under federal law, workers can take up to four months of leave after the birth or adoption of a child. But there is no requirement that it be paid.</p>
<p id="WdXqLD">Nearly every industrialized country in the world provides working mothers with at least three months of paid maternity leave — <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_124442/lang--en/index.htm">the minimum recommended</a> by the United Nations’s International Labour Organization. In <a href="https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/WORLD%20Report%20-%20Parental%20Leave%20OECD%20Country%20Approaches_0.pdf">most of those countries</a>, employers and employees pay a tax to fund the benefit. Canada <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/mothers-day/federal-budget-2017-maternity-leave/article34414374/">has this type of system</a>, which allows parents to take a year of leave while receiving 55 percent of their salary the entire time (up to 80 percent of wages are covered for low-income workers).</p>
<p id="lzCzgc">Some US businesses voluntarily offer paid parental leave to their workers, but only <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/23/access-to-paid-family-leave-varies-widely-across-employers-industries/">about one in 10 workers</a> in the country get such a benefit from their employer. Low-wage workers are the least likely to receive it. In response to federal inaction on the issue, several states have started requiring employers to provide some paid leave: California, New York, and the District of Columbia are among those that do.</p>
<p id="IPctSq">Research shows that paid-leave programs improve child health, promote gender equality, and help keep women in the workforce. Studies indicate that California’s paid-leave law, which went into effect in 2004, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3701456/">led to an increase</a> in work hours and income for mothers with young children. And paid leave has been linked to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13668803.2015.1080661?journalCode=ccwf20">lower poverty rates</a> in 18 countries.</p>
<p id="DNDoLD">Coming up with an effective paid parental leave system in the United States isn’t hard. The hard part is getting Republicans to agree that businesses should pay for some of it. Harris and Klobuchar didn’t mention how they would persuade a potentially divided Congress to pass any paid-leave program if they made it to the White House. But getting presidential candidates to discuss parental leave at all is a pretty good start.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/21/20975363/democratic-debate-paid-family-leave-child-careAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-15T15:30:00-05:002019-11-15T15:30:00-05:00Disturbing video shows an Arizona sheriff’s deputy body slam a quadruple amputee
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<p>It all happened in a group foster home.</p> <p id="yK5DWz">There was screaming, cursing, and a head slammed against the wall. A public defender called it “egregious.” Another called it “horrific.”</p>
<p id="vY4u14">In a video that <a href="https://www.kold.com/2019/11/14/watch-teenage-quadruple-amputee-wrestled-ground-by-deputy/">aired Thursday</a> on Tucson’s KOLD news station, a white sheriff’s deputy is seen tackling and wrestling a black teen in foster care. The teen — an amputee with no arms or legs — repeatedly screams at the police officer to get off of him.</p>
<p id="OOyytP">The sheriff’s deputy holds the boy in a headlock on the ground and curses in his face before arresting him for disorderly conduct. The deputy then screams at the teenager who was recording the scene, handcuffs him, and slams his head against the wall. </p>
<p id="Wb0YmB">It was an extraordinary amount of violence against two defenseless youths — all in the span of eight minutes. The incident happened in September, but KOLD didn’t get a hold of the footage until this week. </p>
<p id="rpJRj7">According to KOLD, the Pima County sheriff’s deputy was responding to a call at a Tucson group home about a disruptive teenager. Yet his angry and violent response was striking, especially because the teens seemed to be behaving like, well, teenagers.</p>
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<p id="5SJB7V">The sheriff’s office told KOLD that it is investigating the officer’s conduct, and state prosecutors have since dropped charges against the two youths. The incident is all too similar to other videos that have gone viral, showing police officers use excessive force against black men. But there was something particularly disturbing about watching a deputy mistreat such vulnerable children. As if they hadn’t been through enough.</p>
<h3 id="kiSjDS">Children in group homes have already experienced enough trauma</h3>
<p id="dQHYIZ">One of the most remarkable things about the latest incident was where it happened: in a group home for boys in foster care. These residential facilities are supposed to be safe places for some of country’s most troubled youths.</p>
<p id="PQThbm">More than <a href="https://www.casey.org/media/Group-Care-complete.pdf">23,000 children in the foster care system</a> live in group homes like the one in Tucson. And they are far more likely to have experienced multiple forms of trauma in their short lives, <a href="https://www.casey.org/media/Group-Care-complete.pdf">according to research by the Casey Family Programs</a>. For example, 55 percent have been physically abused, 40 percent have been sexually abused, 68 percent have been emotionally abused, and 62 percent have suffered a traumatic loss. A majority have mental health problems or physical disabilities. </p>
<p id="T8uxix">Few details about the Tucson teenager have been released to protect his privacy, but KOLD said he was in a group home because he was abandoned by his parents. Little is also known about the group home where the incident took place, and there is no reason to believe there was abuse or neglect by caregivers.</p>
<p id="Endnvs">However, reports of abuse and neglect of children in group homes are common. In Illinois, for example, a <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/grouphomes/ct-group-home-investigations-cila-met-20161117-htmlstory.html">2016 investigation by</a> the Chicago Tribune described state taxpayer-funded group homes as “a system where caregivers often failed to provide basic care while regulators cloaked harm and death with secrecy and silence.”</p>
<p id="pyerZh">The newspaper uncovered 1,311 cases of documented injuries, hundreds of which were not reported by the Illinois Department of Human Services. Residents were often deprived of food, forced to wear dirty clothing and restrained with duct tape.</p>
<p id="kpeom8">The investigation prompted Congress to request and audit of group homes by the US Department of Health and Human Services. In 2018, <a href="https://www.oig.hhs.gov/reports-and-publications/featured-topics/group-homes/">the agency released its report</a>, which found that children in these settings “often experienced serious injuries and medical conditions that resulted in emergency room visits.” The audits also revealed that 99 percent of those critical injuries were not reported to the appropriate law enforcement or state agencies, as required by law.</p>
<p id="5URpm0">Foster children who live in residential facilities are already traumatized and at high-risk of abuse. These are children that need police protection, not mistreatment. Black young people, in particular, are already overexposed to police violence.</p>
<h3 id="wlEa8A">Exposure to police violence can have harmful effects on black and brown children </h3>
<p id="u6Ja4m">Children of color, like the two teens in Tucson, often have traumatizing encounters with police officers from a young age. </p>
<p id="QUpzsE">In recent years, a number of media stories have called attention to the ways that black children in particular are <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/31/17806216/washington-post-police-shootings-black-children-glenn-kessler-tamir-rice-jordan-edwards">exposed to police violence</a>, whether they are directly confronted by police, live in communities where police violence has occurred, or witness excessive force from law enforcement. </p>
<p id="SqUZhP">And research has shown that adults often see both black boys and girls as older, <a href="https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0035663.pdf">more deserving of suspicion</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/5/16/18624683/black-girls-racism-bias-adultification-discipline-georgetown">less innocent than white children</a>.<strong> </strong>This suggests that when it comes to policing incidents where black children are present, authority figures may not see these children as bystanders needing protection. In some cases, black children may instead be seen as suspects themselves, and are denied the presumption of innocence given to other children.</p>
<p id="p9hChY">Witnessing police violence also affects their ability to trust officers and very likely shifts how they perceive themselves in many cases. </p>
<p id="heWWCs">In April, a Florida sheriff’s deputy was been placed on restricted duty after a<strong> </strong>video showing him <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/justice-for-lucca-viral-video-broward-police">slamming a black teenager’s head into the ground</a> and punching him went viral, fueling calls for the officer to be fired. Deputy Christopher Krickovich<strong> </strong>and another officer had approached a large group of high school students in a shopping center in Tamarac, and one of the boys was arrested for trespassing, according to a <a href="https://app.box.com/s/jmx8y92eyg0b79mbcqpph54vaagivwv0">report submitted by the officers</a>. Video footage taken by students at the scene shows the boy in handcuffs and a nearby officer push another boy back. As the boy moves, he is pepper-sprayed in the face. When the teen begins to walk away, the officer pulls him to the ground.</p>
<p id="nSyouM">This kind of police aggression is all too similar to the deputy’s response in Tucson. Viral videos like these have done a lot to raise public awareness of the violence that black boys and men deal with on a regular basis. It’s just not enough to stop it from happening again. </p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/15/20966471/tucson-police-video-amputee-group-homeAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-14T17:20:00-05:002019-11-14T17:20:00-05:00A libertarian group is suing California for allegedly discriminating against men
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<img alt="Men’s feet in loafers with colorful socks." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TmGaUAvlbzACGZL9qPR7KFaUljk=/314x0:3187x2155/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65703650/GettyImages_965568330.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Rob Walton, Walmart board member, shows off his socks featuring pink flamingoes during the annual Walmart shareholders meeting event on June 1, 2018, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. | Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>A new state law requires all public companies to have at least one woman on their board.</p> <p id="D79W0n">A libertarian group is suing California for alleged discrimination — against men.</p>
<p id="vXathp">The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a new state law that requires California companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019. The largest California companies will need a total of three female directors by 2022. </p>
<p id="iwObxQ">In September, California became the first US state to mandate board room gender diversity. About a quarter of the state’s companies don’t have any female directors, and the rest have very few. The law is part of a growing movement to get more women into lucrative positions that have long been held by men.</p>
<p id="mIBBz9">But attorneys for the legal group argue that the so-called “woman quota” is unlawful and that it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, according <a href="https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Creighton-Meland-v.-Alex-Padilla-Secretary-of-State-of-California-Complaint.pdf">to the lawsuit</a> filed in Sacramento federal court. Their plaintiff, Creighton Meland, is a retired Chicago attorney who owns stock in a California-based company that has no women in its boardroom. </p>
<p id="d1LmMe">Meland believes that the new rules will force shareholders to “discriminate on the basis of sex” when they vote for potential board members. In other words, Meland seems worried that the law discriminates against men. But his attorneys also insist that the rule is bad for women.</p>
<p id="7LzI9b">“This law is built on the condescending belief that women aren’t capable of getting into the boardroom unless the government opens the door for them,” said his attorney, Anastasia Boden, <a href="https://pacificlegal.org/press-release/californias-woman-quota-targeted-in-new-lawsuit/">in a statement</a> Wednesday.</p>
<p id="4pcOqN">The legal challenge is the latest “reverse discrimination” claim related to policies and legislation that aim to level the playing field for historically underrepresented groups. It’s particularly interesting that the Pacific Legal Foundation considers the law discriminatory and “condescending” when it was intended to counteract the pervasive gender bias that has long kept women out of corner offices and boardrooms. It also overlooks a company’s best financial interests: Research shows that having more women on corporate boards is good for a company’s bottom line. </p>
<h3 id="6zUbzv">The US could do better</h3>
<p id="uqKXbQ">The United States lags other developed countries when it comes to gender diversity in the boardroom. In 18 countries, including Austria, Poland, and South Africa, all large companies have at least one female director. The United States has not yet made that list. In fact, the global research firm Egon Zehnder said progress for women has slowed in the US since 2012.</p>
<p id="sHQneO">Silicon Valley, in particular, has been long criticized for its lack of representation. Last year, the majority of tech startups (63 percent) had no female board members. But among publicly traded companies in the state, the tech industry is not even the worst offender. Health care and biotech companies in California are the least likely to hire women to serve on boards.</p>
<p id="HwpiCn">Only 12.8 percent of the board seats at these companies are held by women. And about one-third (33.9 percent) have no women at all. In fact, California companies have fewer female directors than the nationwide average.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T4mGvK0yxmLWqofsxHTnZTynNho=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19376132/Screen_Shot_2019_11_14_at_10.37.10_AM.png">
<cite>Board Governance Research, 2017</cite>
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<p id="YkOLf8">That’s not a great look for the state. California has one of the largest economies in the world, so any progress that happens there has global impact. Without a mandate, California companies likely wouldn’t change a thing.</p>
<h3 id="DPPBXQ">The new law, SB-826, explained</h3>
<p id="wLVtXj">By the end of this year, every publicly traded company based in California is supposed to have at least one woman on its board of directors. By 2022, that number will increase depending on a company’s size. For example, a corporation with five directors must have a minimum of two female directors and a company with six or more directors must have at least three female directors.</p>
<p id="Ny9XSd">That means Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would need to give another board seat to a woman within the next two years. Right now, the company has 10 seats and <a href="https://abc.xyz/investor/other/board/">only two</a> female directors. Any company that doesn’t meet the quota would be fined $100,000 for the first violation and $300,000 for any following violations.</p>
<p id="feTXjd">The seeds for the law were planted in 2013 when the state Senate passed a resolution that set a target for companies. The plan was that, by 2017, each public company in California would have at least one woman on its board, and up to three, depending on the size. </p>
<p id="Kz6V9C">California was the first state in the US to adopt this type of resolution, and five other states have since passed similar measures. The problem is that it didn’t work because it wasn’t legally binding. By 2017, fewer than 20 percent of the 3,000 largest US companies based in California had met the target.</p>
<p id="TRSfJ9">Lawmakers decided that a mandate was the only way for things to change. It’s not such a wild idea. Several European countries have mandated gender diversity on corporate boards. In 2003, Norway was the first to require that 40 percent of board seats be held by women, followed by France and Belgium. In 2015, Germany mandated that 30 percent of corporate board seats be held by women. </p>
<h3 id="8ChZ9F">The lawsuit is about a problem that doesn’t exist</h3>
<p id="5TT2VL">The new California law seems like a reasonable policy. But the Pacific Legal Foundation thinks it’s an egregious abuse of individual rights. More specifically, the group argues that it’s infringing on the rights of men.</p>
<p id="4HX3Qk">The plaintiff, Meland, is a shareholder in OSI, a medical and security device manufacturer based in Hawthorne, California. Men hold each of the company’s seven board seats, but the company will need to give three of those seats to women by 2022.</p>
<p id="62EBTy">“The Woman Quota imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination,” Meland’s attorney claims, according to the court filing.</p>
<p id="teLGwA">In other words, Meland is arguing that the law discriminates against men and infringes on his rights as a shareholder to vote for whomever he wants on the board. What he fails to note is that gender bias is what has kept so many women off of US boards.</p>
<p id="BdAkqi">That’s because directors usually recommend CEOs and other corporate executives to serve on their boards. “Relying on current directors’ recommendations will generally produce candidates much like those directors,” say <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/board-diversity-survey.html">Deloitte researchers in the company’s 2017 board diversity survey</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p id="Lcxd0e">The low percentage of women candidates (16 percent) is striking, as is that of racial minorities (19 percent). However, that may be a logical outcome of a process favoring selecting candidates with board experience — who historically have tended to be white and male.</p></blockquote>
<p id="lg0gUy">Women hold less than a third of executive positions in corporate America. White men hold 63 percent. Research shows that men <a href="https://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=barriers-and-bias">have more opportunities to network</a>, and that is often more important to career advancement than performance. Gender stereotypes, like the idea that women are not primary breadwinners, <a href="https://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=barriers-and-bias">still hold back women</a> from climbing the corporate ladder.</p>
<p id="qQM0X4">But here’s the thing: research also shows that companies with more female directors perform better. </p>
<h3 id="5irrBW">Diversity in the board room pays off</h3>
<p id="kkZvxu">Studies have shown that companies with higher levels of gender diversity have stronger financial performance and a more engaged workforce.</p>
<p id="YogSjg">In particular, a growing body of research shows that having three women on a corporate board represents a “tipping point” in impacting a firm’s financial performance, according to <a href="https://www.msci.com/www/blog-posts/the-tipping-point-women-on/0538249725">a 2016 study by the research firm MSCI ERG</a>.</p>
<p id="0VeiSS">The firm analyzed financing results for US companies over a five-year period, from 2011 to 2016. Those that started with at least three women on the board saw gains in equity returns of about 10 percentage points and a 37 percent increase in earnings per share. In contrast, companies that began the period with no female directors experienced negative results (-1 percent and -8 percent, respectively).</p>
<p id="AgUEWu">Credit Suisse conducted a six-year global research study from 2006 to 2012 with more than 2,000 companies worldwide, showing that having women in the board room is correlated with higher performance. For companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion, stocks for companies with female directors outperformed those with all-male boards by 26 percent.</p>
<p id="5i8LWb">Requiring companies to diversify their board rooms seems hardly controversial. Yet in 2019, some men still think that women’s advancement is a direct threat.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2019/11/14/20964673/california-board-diversity-lawsuit-sb826Alexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-06T14:50:00-05:002019-11-06T14:50:00-05:00How the teachers strikes gave Democrats a win in deep red Kentucky
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<img alt="A teacher waves a poster that reads “My Mama don’t like you and she likes everyone” during a day of action at the Kentucky State Capitol on April 13, 2018 in Frankfort, Kentucky." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FXHaocM31RJ_hI4Tak9pWC8qqrI=/0x0:3000x2250/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65639088/GettyImages_945850212.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Kentucky Public school teachers rally at the Kentucky State Capitol to pressure lawmakers to override Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s veto of the state’s tax and budget bills on April 13, 2018 in Frankfort, Kentucky. | Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Republican Gov. Matt Bevin made some powerful enemies.</p> <p id="o9mbLR">Andy Beshear just flipped Kentucky’s governor’s seat from red to blue, and he did it with an army of public school teachers behind him.</p>
<p id="1Cjb9r">Hundreds of teachers made phone calls, knocked on doors, and offered voters a ride to the polls. They organized get-out-the-vote programs and “Bevin is a Bully” events (deriding incumbent GOP Gov. Matt Bevin). </p>
<p id="SdyhcI">While the teachers’ actions were driven more by their intense hatred of Bevin than by pure enthusiasm for Beshear, it still worked. On Tuesday, by a slim margin of 5,300 votes, Beshear ousted the Republican governor of a deep red state. Even President Donald Trump’s rally to support Bevin the day before wasn’t enough to save him.</p>
<p id="xcWjtj">In a private Facebook group, Kentucky teachers rejoiced as the results came in Tuesday night.</p>
<p id="oRQkn3">“I’m so proud of us!” a school librarian commented on the page of Kentucky 120 United, a grassroots group of 7,000 teachers and educators who organized the teachers strikes in 2018.</p>
<p id="r94mLS">“Everyone should wear blue tomorrow because we turned KY blue,” wrote another member.</p>
<p id="aWu8Kt">Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association, said he’s never seen teachers so engaged in the political process. About 1,000 members volunteered on Beshear’s campaign, he said.</p>
<p id="CiXnpQ">“The case they made to their communities changed the course of this election and the course of public education in this state,” Campbell told me Wednesday. His organization represents more than 45,000 current and retired educators, and many aspiring teachers.</p>
<p id="3feXsU">Kentucky teachers don’t get all the credit for Beshear’s win, though. Bevin is largely to blame for his own loss (as of press time, he still hasn’t conceded the race). He is one of the most unpopular governors in the country, with <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2019/01/10/americas-most-and-least-popular-governors-q4-2018/">a 51 percent disapproval</a> rating. And he incensed teachers last year when he tried to cut their pension benefits and public school funding. The teachers strikes that followed helped seal his fate.</p>
<h3 id="dOtz6S">Bevin’s budget cuts and insults riled up teachers</h3>
<p id="XcZa7f">In January 2018, Bevin <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/education/2018/01/18/gov-matt-bevin-proposed-budget-k-12-education/1043409001/">proposed a state budget</a> that would have required school districts to cut costs by 12 percent, and would have slashed $16 million in funding for new textbooks and other classroom materials. That angered the Kentucky Education Association union.</p>
<p id="wBLjEz">Then, in April 2018, Republican lawmakers quickly passed a bill, which Bevin signed, that cut pension benefits for new and retired teachers. Teachers flipped out — 5,000 of them walked out of class to protest outside the state capitol in Frankfort.</p>
<p id="rliYTc">Later that month, teachers went on strike again, temporarily shutting down every public school in the state after Bevin vetoed a two-year budget that would have boosted school funding by $480 million through various tax hikes. </p>
<p id="8AQI96">Facing pressure from thousands of chanting teachers, Republican lawmakers voted to override the governor. Bevin was not happy about that, which led to another mistake. He began hurling insults at teachers.</p>
<p id="an9NzP">During the April 2018 strike, he described teachers as “selfish.” He called them “thugs.” He even went so far as to blame teachers for child abuse during the work stoppage.</p>
<p id="uzqb5t">“You know how many hundreds of thousands of children were left home alone today? I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them,” Bevin <a href="https://twitter.com/MarcusGreenWDRB/status/984939449661513728">told reporters</a> during the April strike. “I guarantee you somewhere today, a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were left alone because a single parent didn’t have any money to take care of them.”</p>
<p id="qLT83L">Bevin’s comments sparked a fierce backlash from teachers and lawmakers from both parties. One of those critics was from the state’s Democratic Attorney General at the time, Beshear.</p>
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<p id="fAfhAk">1/3 “Gov. Bevin’s comments last night saying teachers rallying in Frankfort led to children being sexually abused are morally reprehensible and must be condemned by all Kentuckians.</p>
<p id="9o22Lg">— KY Attorney General (@kyoag) <a href="https://twitter.com/kyoag/status/985137387297701888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 14, 2018</a></p>
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<p id="8HoJWw">Republicans and Democrats in the House went as far as to pass their own resolutions publicly denouncing Bevin’s comments. Meanwhile, teachers warned Bevin that they would “Remember in November,” when he was up for reelection. And they did.</p>
<h3 id="nAkYtr">Education was central to Beshear’s campaign</h3>
<p id="IFRbdT">Beshear made a smart move when he announced his run for governor earlier this year: He made education a central part of his campaign for governor. His platform on education for the state <a href="https://andybeshear.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Final-Teacher-Pay-Plan.pdf">gives every teacher</a> an immediate $2,000 across-the-board pay raise and ensures teachers aren’t paid less than $40,000. He also proposed new funding streams for the pension system. </p>
<p id="ukA11p">He even picked a high school assistant principal, Jacqueline Coleman, as his running mate. As Lt. Governor, Coleman would oversee the administration’s education reform agenda. </p>
<p id="AwHRpL">Coleman, who has a large following on social media, has been a staunch critic of Bevin’s policy proposals.</p>
<p id="2cduvg">“We’re facing teacher shortages here in Kentucky, but Matt Bevin has spent his time bullying educators and tearing down public education,” she tweeted earlier this month. Unsurprisingly, Beshear and Coleman snagged the endorsement of the teachers union.</p>
<p id="rPlhyR">Bevin scoffed at the Democrats’ education proposals, calling them unfeasible. He had instead promised education reform that would give more students a chance to attend private schools — something public school teachers hated. He also promised to allocate money from the state’s budget surplus to the teachers’ pension system.</p>
<p id="q8yJwM">By the summer of 2018, Bevin’s relationship with teachers was already ruined. Teachers organized against his campaign the way they organized their walkouts: through social media.</p>
<p id="BOVaU1">The Kentucky 120 United group posted volunteer opportunities for Beshear’s campaign on its Facebook page and repeatedly encouraged members to participate. That’s also where teachers coordinated get-out-the-vote events at dozens of elementary schools. And it’s where they griped about Bevin to each other in private.</p>
<p id="k1aM5m">So teachers may not be solely responsible for Beshear’s historic win, but they sure opened the governor’s mansion door for him.</p>
<p id="T9mWMN"><em>Correction</em>: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported the last time Kentucky had a Democratic governor. It was in 2015.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/6/20951459/kentucky-democrat-beshear-bevin-teachersAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-04T15:35:00-05:002019-11-04T15:35:00-05:00The firing of McDonald’s CEO won’t solve the chain’s sexual harassment problem
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<img alt="A McDonald’s workers marches toward the company’s headquarters with the words “Me Too” written on a piece of tape covering her mouth on September 18, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/004DhESoHUxUlgIi78SbrAZGHSs=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65623339/GettyImages_1035627134.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>McDonald’s workers march toward the company’s headquarters to protest sexual harassment at the fast food chain’s restaurants on September 18, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. | Scott Olson/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>It’s an empty gesture.</p> <p id="CtGO9R">The CEO of McDonald’s <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63908/000089882219000080/pressrelease1.htm">was booted</a> from the company Friday after the board of directors discovered that he had a consensual romantic relationship with an employee.</p>
<p id="9e3o3w">Stephen Easterbrook, who has been the top executive at McDonald’s since 2015, stepped down for his “<a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63908/000089882219000080/pressrelease1.htm">poor judgment</a>” in violating the company’s code of conduct, according to an SEC filing. The news was first reported <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/mcdonalds-fires-ceo-steve-easterbrook-over-relationship-with-employee-11572816660?mod=hp_lead_pos4">by the Wall Street Journal</a>, with few details about the relationship.</p>
<p id="cIbm6p">Easterbrook’s <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63908/000089882219000080/mcdsepagmt.htm">separation agreement</a> shows that he will get about 6.5 months of severance (his base salary is $1.5 million). As part of the deal, Easterbrook signed a confidentiality agreement and vowed not to work for McDonald’s competitors for two years.</p>
<p id="q1OGqc">Easterbrook is divorced, and it’s not illegal to have a consensual relationship with a work subordinate. However, the power dynamic is problematic, as a subordinate may feel forced into a relationship to keep his or her job. Corporate executives have long gotten away with this behavior, but that’s starting to change. Easterbrook’s firing shows how strict companies have become about workplace dating as stories of rampant sexual harassment have rocked corporate America. </p>
<p id="OZf1lb">And yet the move seems like an empty gesture in light of the serious allegations of sexual harassment that McDonald’s restaurant employees have reported over the years.</p>
<p id="bl75yX">“[T]he company has refused to listen to us. With the firing of Steve Easterbrook, we now know why. It’s clear McDonald’s culture is rotten from top to bottom. McDonald’s needs to sit down with worker-survivors and put them at the center of any solution,” the Fight for $15 and a Union movement, which is organizing McDonald’s workers across the country, said in a statement Sunday.</p>
<p id="sWJJlo">Dozens of women have filed gender discrimination complaints against the company since 2016, arguing that McDonald’s has allowed a toxic work culture to flourish at its independently owned franchises. McDonald’s has since rolled out a sexual harassment prevention training for franchise owners, but restaurant workers say it has done nothing to keep them safe. Easterbrook’s firing is a reminder that the company has done very little to protect its most vulnerable workers.</p>
<h3 id="zuNiUS"><strong>Women want McDonald’s to take sexual harassment seriously</strong></h3>
<p id="pVl9xm">Long before the #MeToo movement became a force to contend with, women who work at McDonald’s have been complaining about widespread sexual harassment at the iconic fast food chain.</p>
<p id="v2AVvb">Women say they are <a href="https://twitter.com/fightfor15/status/1039890320085856256"><strong>fed up</strong></a> with supervisors who grope them, ask for sex, and expose themselves on the job. When they report the behavior, managers ignore them, they say, or even punish them. In 2015, women who work at McDonald’s went on strike in Chicago to express their frustration. In September 2018, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/13/17855198/mcdonalds-strike-me-too"><strong>they went on strike again</strong></a>, this time in 10 cities.</p>
<p id="RSsBxP">Female McDonald’s employees have filed more than 50 sexual harassment lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the past three years, according to the Fight for $15 labor movement, which was launched by the Service Employees International Union in 2012. Some of the cases are still under investigation by the EEOC, which is part of the process before workers can sue. The company is currently trying to settle some of the lawsuits that have made it to court. Meanwhile, not much has changed for women who work at the chain. </p>
<p id="1Brzun">In May, a group of 25 women in 20 cities <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/21/18633995/mcdonalds-workers-strike-sexual-harassment">filed sexual harassment complaints</a> against McDonald’s with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most are new cases that must first go through an EEOC investigation, but a handful involve complaints women filed with the agency last year, which they are now taking to court. In the latest round of complaints, which are included in the tally of more than 50 cases mentioned above, workers as young as 16 have accused supervisors of serious misconduct, including attempted rape, indecent exposure, groping, and sexual offers. The women said they were ignored, mocked, or punished when they reported it. Some had their hours cut back and others were fired.</p>
<p id="quyzIP">“Sexual harassment is not something you should have to endure no matter how desperately you need a job,” Maribel Hoyos, who quit her job at a McDonald’s restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, told reporters that in May. Hoyos said she and her teenage daughter, who both worked at the same restaurant, were punished for complaining about a manager who repeatedly groped them and made unwanted sexual advances. “I was passed over for a promotion, my work hours were cut and I was cut out of managers’ training program. Then we fell behind on our rent.” </p>
<p id="HRS65f">Before the September 2018 strike, a spokesperson for McDonald’s <a href="https://apnews.com/0f70d30d6bcf49bba9eb58cb91f09184"><strong>told the AP</strong></a> that the company had several policies and training programs in place to help franchises prevent harassment, and that they’ve hired experts to help “<a href="https://apnews.com/0f70d30d6bcf49bba9eb58cb91f09184"><strong>evolve</strong></a>” those procedures. </p>
<p id="wleYPn">In May, in response to the most recent complaints, <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mcdonalds-sexual-harassment-20190521-story.html">Easterbrook said</a> that the company recently began offering sexual harassment prevention training to franchise owners and general managers, and that about <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mcdonalds-sexual-harassment-20190521-story.html">90 percent of them</a> have gone through it. He also said the company launched an anonymous hotline to report complaints. It’s unclear what happens after the complaints are filed.</p>
<p id="f0edwd">The company, based in Chicago, had been slow to get involved because it doesn’t consider franchise workers company employees. There are more than 38,000 McDonald’s restaurants around the country, but the vast majority (93 percent) are owned by independent franchises companies.</p>
<p id="2nBREh">McDonald’s is <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mcdonalds-nlrb/mcdonalds-agrees-settlement-in-franchisees-u-s-labor-case-idUSKBN1GV2BL"><strong>locked in a labor dispute</strong></a> over whether the fast-food chain is considered a “joint employer,” and is therefore partly liable for labor violations committed by individual franchises.<strong> </strong>The company argues that <a href="https://www.nrn.com/workforce/mcdonalds-and-nlrb-reach-settlement-joint-employer-case"><strong>it is not a joint employer</strong></a>, so it cannot be held legally accountable for sexual harassment and other illegal workplace behavior at any of its independently owned restaurants. Workers disagree. They say the company has too much control over franchise restaurants and workers to make that claim.</p>
<h3 id="GLEbuR"><strong>Sexual harassment has been a problem at McDonald’s for decades</strong></h3>
<p id="Qc87wO">America’s most famous burger chain has a history of discrimination investigations that dates back even further than the strikes. </p>
<p id="ZQaKaE">In 2008, a Colorado-based McDonald’s franchise <a href="https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/4-7-08.cfm?renderforprint=1"><strong>agreed to pay $505,000</strong></a> to a group of female employees as part of a settlement with the EEOC. In the <a href="https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/4-7-08.cfm?renderforprint=1"><strong>original lawsuit</strong></a>, attorneys for the EEOC said teenage girls who worked at a restaurant in Denver were subjected to “egregious sexual harassment in the workplace by their male supervisor.” The supervisor allegedly bit their breasts and grabbed their buttocks, and offered favors in exchange for sex.</p>
<p id="S1TT8x">Then, in 2011, the agency <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/7-18-12a.cfm"><strong>sued the owner</strong></a> of a Wisconsin McDonald’s, claiming that the male employees made sexual comments about the bodies of their female co-workers, propositioned them, kissed them, and groped them without consent. Several of the victims were teenage girls in high school. </p>
<p id="BbucSZ">“Despite being notified of the situation, [the owner] failed and refused to take prompt and appropriate action to correct the harassment and the resulting hostile environment, forcing at least one of the harassed employees to quit. Further, the company fired other harassed employees after they complained repeatedly about their co-workers’ behavior,” the EEOC said in a <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/7-18-12a.cfm"><strong>press release</strong></a> at the time. The restaurant owners settled the case for <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/7-18-12a.cfm"><strong>$1 million</strong></a>.</p>
<p id="CX031c">These are just a few of the cases that the EEOC agreed to take to court. But most women employees have to pursue cases on their own, which places a huge burden on low-wage workers in the fast-food industry, many of whom are young and may not be aware of their legal rights. </p>
<p id="5c41e8">While it’s a good, public-facing step to fire Easterbrook over a consensual relationship, it’s going take a lot more to convince workers that something has fundamentally changed.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20947689/mcdonalds-ceo-steve-easterbrook-firedAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-01T15:00:00-04:002019-11-01T15:00:00-04:00The 11-day teachers strike in Chicago paid off
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<img alt="A teacher yells through a megaphone as strikers march in the snow through the streets." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6TxCnpGn0q58sRY1W01m5VsFjBk=/459x0:7798x5504/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65608766/GettyImages_1179219319.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Facing snow and cold temperatures, thousands marched through the streets near City Hall during the 11th day of the teachers strike on October 31, 2019, in Chicago. | Scott Heins/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>It got more than $30 million extra spending for public schools.</p> <p id="4CElpJ">Thousands of Chicago public school teachers are back in class.</p>
<p id="fJwOQp">Teachers returned to school Friday after going on strike for 11 days. They had picketed in the snow and rain until union leaders and city officials struck a deal to raise teacher pay and to put a social worker and nurse in each school. Some of the teachers’ most ambitious proposals, such as requiring the city to expand affordable housing, didn’t make the cut.</p>
<p id="A75E8a">“Did we accomplish every single little thing? No. But I can say that we moved the needle on educational justice in the city,” Jesse Sharkey, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ctulocal1">said in a press conference</a> Thursday.</p>
<p id="j9T3XX">The district also committed to spending $35 million to shrink oversized classrooms and to prioritize schools that serve the most at-risk students. The deal includes a 16 percent pay raise for teachers over five years, and a remarkable 40 percent raise for teaching assistants, clerks, and other lower-paid workers. The new, five-year contract will also boost investment per pupil and reduce the number of students in each class.</p>
<p id="mMQWYA">Teachers had wanted more, though. They also wanted more affordable housing in the city for students and teachers. That’s something no teachers union has demanded in recent contract negotiations.</p>
<p id="Iy5XgY">These kinds of broad demands are part of a growing movement, led by teachers and labor unions, focused more on social justice issues affecting their communities than simply pay. It’s known as <a href="https://smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/ciwo_bcg-memo.pdf"><strong>“bargaining for the common good.”</strong></a></p>
<p id="WxeaLo">Chicago public schools serve a high percentage of poor students, and the district has long struggled with low graduation rates. Though <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/8/29/20838923/cps-chicago-public-schools-graduation-rate-teachers-contract-union-jackson"><strong>high school graduation rates have improved</strong></a> in recent years, its schools are still highly segregated. And compared to surrounding school districts and elsewhere in Illinois, Chicago schools have larger class sizes, <a href="https://today.uic.edu/new-report-details-chicagos-racial-ethnic-disparities"><strong>fewer high school teachers with advanced degrees</strong></a>, and less state investment per pupil. </p>
<p id="VAiQrH">The success of this bargaining model in Chicago and other cities has been mixed so far. Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to focus on affordable housing, but not as part of contract negotiations with teachers. The union did, however, get the city to give sanctuary protection to undocumented immigrants on school property. The final deal shows that strikes work. Chicago teachers didn’t get everything they wanted, but they got got more than ever before, including an extra $30 million in spending on education.</p>
<h3 id="XLHEdo"><strong>Chicago teachers flexed their muscle</strong></h3>
<p id="ryMA89">Lightfoot made national headlines in May when she became the city’s first black, female mayor. Within months, she had to start negotiating with the teachers union as their last contract was about to expire. </p>
<p id="AlQ6HR">Lightfoot had promised during her campaign to boost investment in neighborhood schools; She pledged to add hundreds of social workers, special education case managers, and nurses at schools within the next five years, <a href="https://chalkbeat.org/posts/chicago/2019/09/24/in-chicago-a-tale-of-two-strikes-union-negotiations/"><strong>according to the education news site Chalkbeat</strong></a>. </p>
<p id="cgdCNc">But teachers were frustrated that she wouldn’t put it in writing — in their contract. After they went on strike, it was included: The contract guarantees that social workers and nurses will not be outside contractors, and the school has committed to investing millions of dollars in training for current and new support staff.</p>
<p id="gkNKp9">But the fight between teachers and the city was about much more than that.</p>
<p id="u0NnTB">Illinois’s finances are doing much better than they were in 2012 <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/28/18662706/chicago-teachers-unions-strike-labor-movement">when the teachers last went on strike</a>. The state’s budget was in the red back then; it was a full-blown financial crisis by 2016. While the city still owes creditors millions of dollars, more state money is flowing to Chicago public schools, which serve a majority of high-poverty neighborhoods. </p>
<p id="gEb2Od">Chicago <a href="https://chalkbeat.org/posts/chicago/2019/09/24/in-chicago-a-tale-of-two-strikes-union-negotiations/">saw a surge in tax revenue last year</a>, and teachers want part of the $181 million surplus to go toward hiring more teachers and nurses, and to more social services. That’s why they were demanding an investment in affordable housing — an unusual request from teachers during bargaining talks.</p>
<p id="wkrZgn">Housing is a crucial issue in Chicago, where black residents have been hurt by historic segregation, disinvestment in their communities, and a growing affordable-housing crisis. Lightfoot says she wants to address affordable housing in the city, but she doesn’t want that to be part of a contract with teachers.</p>
<p id="ueLE71">“Affordable housing is a critical issue that affects residents across Chicago, and everyone’s voices need to be heard during this process,” Mayor Lightfoot said in a statement last month. “As such, the [teachers union] collective bargaining agreement is not the appropriate place for the City to legislate its affordable housing policy.”</p>
<p id="njJNS7">But teachers were confident that they could get what they wanted, and they had reason to think so.</p>
<h3 id="p203LB"><strong>A wave of teachers strikes has proven successful </strong></h3>
<p id="A5Rj0c">Frustration over <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/9/17100404/teacher-pay-salary-underpaid-database"><strong>stagnant teacher wages</strong></a>, crumbling infrastructure, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/9/17214924/oklahoma-teacher-strike-tax-cut-rich-charts"><strong>deep budget cuts to education</strong></a> fueled a wave of teacher protests in conservative states in 2018. Educators went on strike in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/25/17276284/arizona-teacher-strike-tax-cut-funding-data"><strong>Arizona</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <a href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained/2018/3/7/17092474/west-virginia-teacher-wildcat-strike-today-explained-podcast"><strong>West Virginia</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17188700/teacher-strikes-oklahoma-kentucky"><strong>Kentucky, and Oklahoma</strong></a>, forcing state lawmakers to raise teacher pay and spend more on schools.</p>
<p id="lH9rBV">But progressive states weren’t immune to the unrest, even though they tend to pay teachers higher salaries. </p>
<p id="0UfI8E">When tens of thousands of teachers went on strike in Los Angeles in January, it was a sign that the movement had expanded beyond the red states where it began and could lead more progressive cities and states to reexamine their investment in public education, too. As part of the deal to end the strike, LA teachers were able to negotiate smaller class sizes and the district agreed to hire more nurses, guidance counselors, librarians, and support staff.</p>
<p id="RN7UwY">That’s what “bargaining for the common good” looks like. It’s a strategy that seems to pay off. LA teachers inspired Chicago teachers to fight for similar gains — and got most of them.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/1/20943464/chicago-teachers-strike-dealAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-11-01T10:20:00-04:002019-11-01T10:20:00-04:00What the mass resignations at Deadspin tell us about work in America
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<img alt="An employee of the website Deadspin holds the logo in front of his face at the company’s office in Manhattan, New York on November 1, 2018." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Uo0JaB3Qijs70fOumsAd38fJvOs=/343x0:5820x4108/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65606208/GettyImages_1178969739.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>An employee at Deadspin’s office in New York before the company was sold to a venture capitalist. | John Taggart/The Washington Post via Getty Im</figcaption>
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<p>The move realized every worker’s fantasy.</p> <p id="LPzCj0">One by one, Deadspin staff writers announced their resignations on Twitter on Wednesday.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just now I resigned my position at Deadspin today along with many of my colleagues. I have been here only five months but they have been some of the best of my career and I will miss it deeply.</p>— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) <a href="https://twitter.com/mckinneykelsey/status/1189657574402150400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 30, 2019</a>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">I just quit, too. Deadspin was a good website.</p>— Dom Cosentino (@domcosentino) <a href="https://twitter.com/domcosentino/status/1189941524940890112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2019</a>
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<p id="Up9FRj">By the end of the day, at least 10 writers had quit their jobs — a sign of protest and solidarity with their interim editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, who defied a mandate from the company’s new owners to “stick to sports.” </p>
<p id="uWTQ7r">The collective quitting stunned other journalists on social media and surfaced the deep tension between writers at the sports-focused news site and the new owners of its parent company, G/O Media. Univision sold the unit to a private equity firm in April, which then appointed former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller as its new chief executive.</p>
<p id="jisMd7">Deadspin staff and other employees at G/O Media have had a lot of <a href="https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=deadspin_twitter">complaints</a> about Spanfeller. They’ve accused him of handing out top editorial positions to his underqualified buddies, without promoting any women or people of color who would have been next in line for some of the spots. </p>
<p id="GS6FfH">They’ve also complained of the new leadership’s repeated interference with their writing, which is known for its irreverent, stick-it-to-the-man take on sports, culture, and politics. (Several former Deadspin staffers did not respond to Vox’s request for comment. G/O’s editorial director recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/business/media/deadspin-editor-fired.html">told the New York Times</a> that the company is simply moving in a new direction, and some employees don’t like that.)</p>
<p id="EEWePA">That’s why things didn’t go over well Monday when the new editorial director demanded that its writers focus strictly on sports, then <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/business/media/deadspin-editor-fired.html">fired Petchesky</a>, who has been with the company for more than 13 years, for refusing to follow the mandate. That’s when the resignations began to trickle in.</p>
<p id="knx6fz">It was striking to watch this unfold, especially at such a turbulent time for the digital news media. Every other day there seems to be a headline announcing another round of media layoffs. Yet here was a group of journalists that decided they would choose when to leave and how to go.</p>
<p id="K23HMq">Yes, part of the mass exodus stems from unhappiness with G/O’s culture and a desire to speak out against corporate overlords. But it also reflects how powerful union organizing in digital media has created an opening for workers to rethink what they are settling for and how to take matters in their own hands. It’s also the dramatic realization of a powerful fantasy.</p>
<h3 id="tskCVE">Walking off the job is a powerful idea</h3>
<p id="MraHLo">At some point or another, everyone has fantasized about doing what Deadspin writers just did: channelling their pent-up frustration and anger on the job into a dramatic exit.</p>
<p id="yBd62J">It’s often just that — a fantasy. Few people can afford to lose their income without another job lined up. But every once in a while, managers push their employees past their breaking point.</p>
<p id="ilD6wQ">In February, the entire staff at a Sonic restaurant in Circleville, Ohio, quit over a dispute with the new owners. They left a note (with some expletives) on the door for customers. “Warning: Due to terrible management, the whole store has quit,” the letter began.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">The entire workforce at the Sonic in Circleville, Ohio just quit en masse to protest their new management and workers least two other Sonics in the area did the same. Check out the lovely note the Circleville workers left. <a href="https://t.co/onSNUMImMb">pic.twitter.com/onSNUMImMb</a></p>— Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc) <a href="https://twitter.com/_ericblanc/status/1099493825834336256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2019</a>
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<p id="ia6qJe">In September, <a href="https://blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping/63410/exclusive-the-shop-staff-quits-en-masse-future-uncertain/">all 26 employees of a gastropub</a> in New York quit at the same time over a number of long-running disputes. They left behind a message that read, “Do Better. Please,” on the chalkboard.</p>
<p id="GopNMH">Workers were willing to put up with a lot during the Great Recession that began a decade ago. But the US is now experiencing the longest economic expansion in US history, and rank-and-file employees are increasingly upset that they are not reaping much of the benefits.</p>
<p id="h767Jn">In fact, about <a href="https://www.gallup.com/education/267590/great-jobs-lumina-gates-omidyar-gallup-quality-report-2019.aspx">60 percent of US workers polled</a> earlier this year said they are unsatisfied with their jobs.</p>
<p id="F6Ix8O">All of this together is pushing workers over the edge, leading them to unionize, strike, and temporarily walk off the job. But the more extreme act of quitting is no longer such a far-fetched fantasy. </p>
<h3 id="ESyuP0">Workers have more power than they imagine</h3>
<p id="zy1Oju">It’s hard to overstate how much leverage workers have right now. For the first time in decades, workers in many industries have a lot of collective power compared to the average CEO, and the Deadspin exodus is just one example of that shifting dynamic. </p>
<p id="Nv3aFT">The simple reason behind this is that the US is experiencing a big labor shortage. For the first time on record, there are more jobs available than there are people looking for work — across industries.</p>
<p id="mSYsWr">And workers in all industries are fed up too. They are fed up with meager pay raises and tired of companies trying to slash benefits to suck up every penny in possible profit. That’s why nearly <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/9/17/20868936/gm-workers-strike-uaw-trump">50,000 workers at General Motors went on strike</a> for six weeks, willing to take a financial hit to make a point. That’s why <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/25/18280718/uber-lyft-drivers-strike-la-los-angeles?link_id=1&can_id=22392248a7380dfbfd3a43376baf9d4d&source=email-todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-32619-los-angeles-uber-and-lyft-drivers-go-on-strike&email_referrer=email_517849&email_subject=todays-headlines-jobs-with-justice-32619-los-angeles-uber-and-lyft-drivers-go-on-strike&fbclid">Uber drivers</a>, grocery store workers, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/4/18125505/marriott-workers-end-strike-wage-raise">hotel housekeepers</a> have gone on strike too in the past year. In 2018, a record number of employees were involved in work stoppages — the highest number since the 1980s. </p>
<p id="1X4AgR">Online media is no stranger to this unease. Journalists have grown weary of constant industry layoffs and unlivable salaries in expensive cities. The very public unionization process at Gawker in 2015 sparked a movement in digital media. Staffers at sites including Vice, ThinkProgress, HuffPost, Thrillist, Mic, and the Intercept soon unionized, too. </p>
<p id="vMo6Ys">Even here at Vox Media, in early June, more than 300 employees participated in a one-day work stoppage. (Disclosure: I am a member of Vox Media Union, which is represented by the Writers Guild of America, East.) A few weeks later, dozens of journalists at BuzzFeed walked off the job out of frustration.</p>
<p id="Acp36c">“In total, the number of unionized workers in internet publishing has risen 20-fold since 2010,” according to a <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-tactics-media-unions-are-using-to-build-membership?utm_source=CNN+Media%3A+Reliable+Sources&utm_campaign=a904c395ef-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_11_04_47_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e95cdc16a9-a904c395ef-83673925"><strong>report in the Harvard Business Review</strong></a>. It’s an astonishing increase, and for the most part, companies quickly recognized their employees’ unions.</p>
<p id="gjRBvK">But this shifting labor dynamic goes further than just strikes and unions. More workers are quitting their jobs altogether. </p>
<p id="oy6ATi">In July, a record 3.7 million workers quit their jobs — the highest number ever recorded in a single month (check out the red line in the graph below). Meanwhile, layoffs and firings remain at record-low levels.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Rhpm3nrrGmJNoMlG4Fem0i6qpnw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19337623/fredgraph_10.png">
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<p id="PN089k">In fact, workers are far more likely to quit their jobs than get fired these days. The data isn’t broken down by industry sectors, so it’s impossible to know how many journalists are quitting or getting fired. But looking at employment projections for the next decade explains a lot. While the number of jobs in traditional broadcasting and print news media are projected to decline, the number of jobs in digital media is expected to grow substantially. That’s because online content is in high demand.</p>
<p id="CQLfLr">Jobs for online writers and editors are expected to grow by 28 percent between 2018 and 2028, <a href="https://data.bls.gov/projections/nationalMatrix?queryParams=519000&ioType=i">according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics</a>. That’s a huge increase compared to the 6 percent job growth expected for the entire US economy. Employment in the broader media and communication field is expected to grow 4 percent more jobs during that time, about 27,600 new positions. </p>
<p id="CZxQvq">“Demand for media and communication occupations is expected to arise from the need to create, edit, translate, and disseminate information through a variety of different platforms,” <a href="https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/home.htm">according to economists at the Department of Labor</a>.</p>
<p id="BSO5td">So, in other words, the Deadspin staff took a huge risk in walking out with no other work lined up. But their chance of finding another media job is high right now. Granted, it might not be their dream job, but it’s still a job. </p>
<p id="V8zBkv">In a way, the Deadspin resignations bring the labor movement full circle. After all, it was Deadspin’s sister site, Gawker, that set off the movement to unionize in digital media. Now writers are demanding more than better pay and benefits. They want more control over their work. In quitting, Deadspin employees took control. Maybe more workers will do the same. </p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/1/20941677/deadspin-resignations-writers-workers-quitAlexia Fernández Campbell2019-10-30T15:30:00-04:002019-10-30T15:30:00-04:00Puerto Rico’s new push for statehood, explained
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<img alt="A woman waves a Puerto Rican flag during a protest against the referendum over Puerto Rico’s political status in San Juan, on June 11, 2017." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fC2RtqzuFeoYRH3Ln9xDQhK-TtE=/293x0:4645x3264/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65585757/GettyImages_694943074.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A woman waves a Puerto Rican flag during a protest against the referendum over Puerto Rico’s political status in San Juan, on June 11, 2017. | Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Another bill to resolve the 128-year-old controversy.</p> <p id="uS03iB">Puerto Rican leaders are pushing for statehood again.</p>
<p id="pBNi3C">Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s sole non-voting member of Congress, introduced a bill Tuesday that would create a path for the US territory to become the 51st state.</p>
<p id="kN7wbC">The bipartisan Puerto Rican Statehood Admission Act would fund a ballot referendum in Puerto Rico in November 2020, asking voters on the island if they want statehood or not. It’s a slight variation of previous ballot measures that went nowhere. If the bill passes, it would mark the third time Puerto Ricans have voted on the statehood issue since 2012.</p>
<p id="NbQFEn">“[The bill] places us on the path towards the political equality we deserve,” González-Colón <a href="https://twitter.com/RepJenniffer/status/1189308109329707008">said on Twitter</a> Tuesday.</p>
<p id="qJiCqc">There’s just one major problem: Like past measures, the result of the vote is not legally binding. So even if a majority of Puerto Ricans voted for statehood, Congress could still decide to do nothing about it. That’s happened before. And it’s not like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown any interest in admitting Puerto Rico into the union.</p>
<p id="jqNZfD">“You just have to call a charade a charade,” Julio Ricardo Varela, co-host of the political podcast <a href="http://inthethickshow.org"><em>In the Thick</em></a>, said on Twitter. His cynicism is shared by many Puerto Ricans in the US who closely follow the island’s politics.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">In other words, what will happen is 2012 all over again: Puerto Rico will hold another non-binding plebiscite on Election Day and nobody in Congress will pay attention or care.<br><br>At some point, when will political mediocrity stop ruling the island-colony? This hasn't worked.</p>— Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77) <a href="https://twitter.com/julito77/status/1189495612783378432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 30, 2019</a>
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<p id="ZB6TDu">Puerto Rican leaders are pushing forward anyway. With Democrats in control of the House, there’s a better chance to pass a statehood bill through the chamber. The island — plagued by the devastation of Hurricane Maria and still struggling to rebuild — has been a US territory since 1898, but has long suffered from widespread American indifference toward, or ignorance of, Puerto Rico’s political status. </p>
<p id="kGrbyv">Even though all Puerto Ricans are US citizens, the 3.4 million Americans who live in Puerto Rico have fewer constitutional rights than anyone living in the 50 states. Americans on the island can’t vote for president in the general election or elect a voting member of Congress, making it easy for congressional leaders to ignore them.</p>
<p id="bOyHWK">The question of whether or not Puerto Rico should become a state has been the most divisive issue on the island for decades. But Puerto Rico’s financial crisis, which began in 2006, began to revive support for statehood, and the brutal aftermath of Hurricane Maria has made the matter even more urgent to resolve. The remaining question is whether the White House and Republicans in Congress will uphold America’s longstanding promise to let Puerto Ricans decide if they want statehood. The chances seem slim.</p>
<h3 id="EKxRQF">Congress has avoided the issue as much as possible</h3>
<p id="thGhRP">The biggest obstacle for Puerto Rico is that there is no official process for a US territory to become a US state. Political leaders on the island have been asking for a clear path to statehood since the 1960s. </p>
<p id="7O7FmW">Past presidents have <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/Puerto_Rico_Task_Force_ExecSummary.pdf"><strong>supported statehood</strong></a> for Puerto Rico, if that’s what the majority of Puerto Ricans wanted. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did. <a href="https://www.puertoricoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/211d8cdc2bb931d8efe42e08bf435a78.pdf">So did Trump</a>, during his presidential campaign. Support for statehood was even enshrined in the Republican Party platform.</p>
<p id="62TXHG">Puerto Rico’s congressional delegates have introduced multiple (failed) bills over the years, which granted Puerto Rico statehood based on the outcome of a popular vote on the island. But there has never been a clear consensus in Puerto Rico on the issue. </p>
<p id="wIVjzP">In 2016, the pro-statehood political party won control over the island’s legislature, the governor’s mansion, and the island’s sole (non-voting) congressional seat. Since then, Puerto Rican leaders have tried various strategies to get lawmakers in Washington to address the issue. Lawmakers have mostly ignored them.</p>
<h3 id="6j6W03">Congress asked Puerto Rico to vote on the statehood issue. It did.</h3>
<p id="vny7TP">In June 2017, after the pro-statehood party swept into power, Puerto Ricans on the island voted to join the United States as the 51st state. It was the fifth time the island has held a referendum on whether to join the republic. The vast majority voted in favor of statehood: 97 percent — the largest number yet. </p>
<p id="UwD4X1">The problem is that fewer than a quarter of registered voters turned out to the polls. That was mostly the result of a boycott from the anti-statehood political groups, who were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/us/puerto-ricans-vote-on-the-question-of-statehood.html">upset with the wording of the referendum</a>.</p>
<p id="tux9HV">Then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló was fulfilling his campaign promise to push forward with the statehood process, as part of the pro-statehood party. The second main political party in Puerto Rico is the Popular Democratic Party, which wants to remain a commonwealth. A smaller number of Puerto Ricans want full independence. </p>
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<p id="3aEIEQ">The island’s current economic crisis, which began around 2008, has <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-pro-statehood-candidate-ricardo-rossell-wins-governor-race-n680576">renewed the effort</a> to gain statehood and helped get Rosselló into office. More federal money would flow to Puerto Rico if it were a state, though it would also increase federal taxes on the people who live there.</p>
<p id="DJAmvw">After the 2016 election, Jenniffer González-Colón introduced two House bills that would allow Puerto Rico to become the 51st American state — one before Hurricane Maria hit, and the in the summer of 2018.</p>
<p id="l8JKbN">When González-Colón introduced a statehood bill in June 2018, she got a group of 53 Republicans and Democrats to co-sponsor it — the most yet. <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6246/cosponsors"><strong>The Puerto Rico Admission Act</strong></a> would have created a task force to immediately start the process of transitioning Puerto Rico into a US state, which would have happened by January 1, 2021.</p>
<p id="EDfbH9">“Now is the time,” González-Colón said in a statement, when she introduced the bill in Congress. “The catastrophe left behind by Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the reality of the unequal treatment of the American living in Puerto Rico.”</p>
<p id="11I5C4">The bill never made it to the House floor for a vote.</p>
<h3 id="Ze1N2d">Puerto Rican identity is deeply rooted in the question of statehood</h3>
<p id="KOGz4z">The status of Puerto Rico has been the main political issue on the island since the United States annexed it in 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War. Over the years, Congress has ceded small amounts of autonomy to Puerto Rico, which now operates as a quasi-state. It has an independent elected local government, but without all the power and benefits of being a state — including a lack of real representation in Congress.</p>
<p id="OwGGsj">Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but they don’t pay federal income taxes if they live on the island. They do pay payroll taxes to fund Social Security and Medicare. The island gets limited funding for Medicaid and food stamps. It doesn’t have representation in the Electoral College, so Puerto Ricans can’t vote for president unless they live in the United States.</p>
<p id="5H40dl">Over the past 50 years, Washington lawmakers have introduced more than 130 bills to resolve Puerto Rico’s political status, and none have gone anywhere. The closest Puerto Rico got to changing its status was in 1990, when the House approved a bill that would let Puerto Ricans decide once and for all whether they wanted to become a state. The bill never made it through the Senate.</p>
<p id="b4nw2y">It’s obvious why Republicans might not want Puerto Rico to join the union. Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, so adding new seats in the Senate and House could weaken Republican power. Yet the Republican Party has always paid lip service to the idea.</p>
<p id="06NKhJ">“Personally, I strongly favor statehood,” President George H.W. Bush <a href="https://www.puertoricoreport.com/president-george-h-w-bush-state-union-address-february-9-1989/#.Xbnb_S2ZOqA">said in his first State of the Union address</a> in 1989. “But I urge the Congress to take the necessary steps to allow the people to decide in a referendum.</p>
<p id="1OURO8">That didn’t happen.</p>
<h3 id="VlSNJG">Hurricane survivors favor statehood </h3>
<p id="hSDb5w">While there has never been a true consensus on the issue, statehood appears to be the most popular option in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.</p>
<p id="j8mklg">Hurricane survivors who live on the island agree that the federal government would have responded differently to the disaster if Puerto Rico were a US state, <a href="http://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-and-Methodology-Views-and-Experiences-of-Puerto-Ricans-One-Year-After-Maria">according to a 2018 survey</a> by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post.</p>
<p id="L4WX6r">The survey also shows that hurricane survivors who live in Puerto Rico favor statehood over any alternative. About 48 percent want Puerto Rico to become a state, 26 percent would rather remain a US territory, and 10 percent want full independence. About 16 percent were unsure or declined to answer. The <a href="http://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-and-Methodology-Views-and-Experiences-of-Puerto-Ricans-One-Year-After-Maria"><strong>survey</strong></a><strong> </strong>included responses from about 1,500 households polled between July and August 2018.</p>
<p id="X4yqtI">The survey reflects a slight shift in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico, which is something González-Colón and her pro-statehood allies in Congress are hoping to capitalize on. By giving voters a simple “yes or no” option to answer whether they want Puerto Rico to become a state, they are hoping to avoid boycotts that would lead some voters to skip the question.</p>
<p id="UolxMG">But even if the referendum shows overwhelming support for Puerto Rico, it’s unclear what comes after that. Just getting enough support for a federally funded ballot measure could be a challenge. Right now, the bill only has 46 co-sponsors in the House — far from a majority.</p>
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<p id="O92ngN">Residents in the District of Columbia have been living with “taxation without representation” from day 1. In September 2019, they took their call for statehood to Congress.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/30/20939916/puerto-rico-statehood-bill-congressAlexia Fernández Campbell