By Katia Hills

When I found out I was pregnant in the fall of 2014, I was so grateful to have a job with AT&T Mobility. My husband and I both worked as sales representatives at the company’s store in Elkhart, Ind. Our jobs provided us a stable, comfortable life that we looked forward to sharing with our son. We made $14 an hour, plus commission, and AT&T Mobility provided generous benefits that included paid maternity leave. We both loved our jobs and looked forward to fulfilling sales careers with the company.

But that hope evaporated as my pregnancy progressed. I had severe nausea that wasn’t just “morning sickness.” I felt sick nearly all the time and had trouble sleeping. In my second and third trimesters, things got even worse, and I developed cholestasis, a disabling liver condition characterized by intense itching all over the body. These difficulties meant that I occasionally was late for my shift, or needed to stay home, and that I had to visit my doctor more often. 

These symptoms were scary and stressful on their own. I never dreamed that they also would cost me my job.

AT&T Mobility has a demerit-based attendance policy — what many employers call a “no fault” policy. What that means is that if you are late or miss work the company assigns you a point, or a fraction of a point. If you receive eight points, you are fired. The company has a list of situations that qualify as exceptions to the policy and won’t cost you a point, but pregnancy isn’t one of them.

Think about how many women you’ve seen working at your local AT&T Mobility store. There are thousands of us, all around the country. Then think about them struggling not to get fired while going through nine months of pregnancy. And think about how many of them lose their jobs before they even make it to their due dates. 

Though my male co-workers were allowed to come and go virtually without penalty, I kept racking up points due to my pregnancy. If throwing up due to severe morning sickness made me late, I got a fraction of a point. Once, I started bleeding and had to be hospitalized overnight. I accrued a point for that too.

By the time I went out on Family and Medical Leave Act leave in late May 2015, I had accumulated close to eight points. My store manager pestered me with questions about how long I’d be out, even trying to convince me to take less than the leave I was entitled to by law. He told me that he didn’t believe new mothers could be counted on to come back to work. I felt like I had done something wrong by wanting to start a family.

My son, Luca, was born on June 1, 2015, three weeks early. In the joyous, sleep-deprived fog that is all too familiar to any new mom, I tried not to think too much about AT&T Mobility’s attendance policy, though I did have to field at least one call from my manager again asking about my return date. I was grateful to have several weeks of paid maternity leave to spend with my baby boy. I know a lot of women aren’t that lucky.

But two days after I returned to work, my manager informed me that additional points had been “processed” during my maternity leave, and I was fired. He claimed he’d appealed to the company, but that the points couldn’t be argued with. I was heartbroken to lose not just my job, but the hope of a career. All at once, what should have been the happiest time of our lives was the most stressful. My husband and I struggled after I lost my income. We managed to get by though we had to give up our apartment and move in with his parents.

I eventually started a new job, and my husband and I hope that we will be able to live on our own again soon, for Luca’s sake. But it’s not clear if it will give the same potential for advancement. In the meantime, I want to make sure that what happened to me doesn’t happen to other women — at AT&T Mobility or anywhere else. So today, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll, and Indianapolis attorney Lynn Toops, I filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of all women employed by AT&T Mobility who have been pregnant and harmed by the point-based attendance policy.   

AT&T Mobility’s so-called “no-fault” attendance policy penalizes workers for absences even if they can be justified as being medically necessary. I have learned that this can be a violation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the FMLA. Under all of those laws, workers may be entitled to take time off to address their own medical needs or those of a close family member, making it illegal for employers to impose negative repercussions for such absences. That includes pregnancy, which is one of the most common reasons that women are pushed out of work in the United States — even though this year marks 40 years since the PDA was enacted.

It’s time for companies like AT&T Mobility to scrap their unfair point systems and do their part to make sure that pregnant workers can keep their jobs while starting their families.

Are you a current or former retail employee of AT&T Mobility? Were you fired for points accumulated due to absences, late arrivals, or early departures due to your pregnancy? 
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Laurie Schipper, Executive Director, Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence & Beth Barnhill, Executive Director, Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault

The “Marsy’s Law” campaign arrived in Iowa this year like it has in many other states. This national effort seeks a specific list of constitutional rights for crime victims more expansive than the statutory rights afforded victims in every state. Iowa’s version sought to enshrine existing legal rights to notification, participation, and restitution into our constitution and add rights to safety, privacy, and the right to refuse discovery requests. For now, state legislators resisted the popular appeal of the campaign’s central theme — that crime victims deserve “equal rights” to the accused in criminal proceedings. 

The Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault remain unwavering in our support for victims, yet we oppose Marsy’s Law. We represent agencies providing direct services to crime victims before, during, and long after any encounter with the criminal legal system. In addition to offering emergency services, these are the people law enforcement call to assist at a crime scene or at the hospital to support rape victims. Lawyers and judges rely on them to accompany victims in court and explain legal proceedings. They help victims obtain housing, jobs, and access to services and safety.  

We believe this well-intentioned effort promotes the wrong mechanism for advancing victims’ rights. Amending the Iowa Constitution to comport with Marsy’s Law undermines the legal system and strains resources to the range of programs addressing victims’ comprehensive needs. The assertion that victims deserve constitutional rights equal to the accused mischaracterizes how the justice system operates. 

Granting equal constitutional rights to a victim identified at the outset of criminal proceedings threatens due process and diminishes fundamental principles of American justice. It also unfairly prioritizes the needs of victims seeking remedy in criminal court over the vast majorities who do not. Victim needs identified in a statewide survey include housing, transportation, counseling, and healthcare, as well as legal assistance. 

Upholding American ideals of justice respects the common interest. Arrest and prosecution of domestic and sexual violence victims remain a problem here. Often it is unclear who the victim is until a judge or jury sorts things out. Frequently, the presumption of innocence is not experienced by domestic and sexual violence victims, especially those from marginalized communities. Women comprise a larger proportion of the prison population than ever, and most are survivors of violence. 

Victim arrests occur in cases of self-defense or when charged with violating their own protective orders for allowing an abusive partner into the house because they could not keep him from being disruptive outside and feared eviction. When both parties are arrested, victims often plead guilty so they can return more quickly to children or a job. 

Rape victims are commonly threatened with prosecution for false reporting as a tactic to get them to recant their stories. And routinely, biases based on race, gender, or immigration status result in the arrest of victims seeking assistance. Iowa ranks third worst among states for racial disparities in our prisons, and many immigrant and LGBTQ survivors cannot access justice in our legal system. 

Opposing Marsy’s Law does not mean we oppose victims’ rights. The amazing service providers we represent go the distance 24/7 and 365 days a year, helping survivors rebuild their lives. Based on several thousand years of combined experience serving victims, directors of every member program in Iowa publicly urged opposition to Marsy’s Law. 

Constitutional rights for the accused exist to limit the state’s power against individuals when the state seeks to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. The accused have constitutional rights because getting it wrong means we imprison innocent people and an offender remains free to harm others. 

Victims’ rights serve a completely different purpose aimed at ensuring recovery for individuals, not protection against state power. Granting victims constitutional rights equal to the accused in criminal proceedings inappropriately undermines due process by creating conflict between victim and defendant rights. It also exacerbates flagrant inequalities in our criminal legal system. 

The insensitivity victims experience is not a constitutional failing. Victims deserve dignity and respect. They deserve to be notified and heard at criminal proceedings. And they deserve to be informed regarding the status of their offender. These rights and more already exist in Iowa’s legal code, but it takes money and people to ensure access to them. A victim cannot exercise her right to be heard in court without transportation to the courthouse or if she needs a lawyer or is reluctant to participate without someone to help her understand the process. 

Adequate funding for systems and services and better enforcement of our victims’ rights laws can more effectively serve survivors. Instead, Marsy’s Law makes sweeping promises the state cannot keep, claims to fix problems constitutions cannot solve and harms our justice system. 

Survivors deserve better than that. 

Laurie Schipper is the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Beth Barnhill is the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the ACLU.

A core promise of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is that a child with disabilities will receive a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment possible. This requirement is a matter of civil rights and equity: It ensures that children do not receive a substandard education because they have a disability. 

In 2004, Congress included another promise of equity when it reauthorized the IDEA by requiring states and the Department of Education to address racial and ethnic disproportionality in special education. To date, that promise has gone unfulfilled. And now, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wants to press pause on the effort to fulfill it. 

“Significant disproportionality” is a term that describes when school districts “identify, place in more restrictive settings, or discipline children from any racial or ethnic group at markedly higher rates than their peers.” The IDEA requires states to determine whether there are disproportionalities in state or in local educational agencies and to make necessary adjustments in policies and practices. 

Recognizing these disparities is hugely important because they can be indicators of over-identification, under-identification, or misidentification of disabilities. In any of these cases, students with disabilities may miss out on opportunities to receive needed and appropriate services. Moreover, over-identification of students of color turns special education into a tool of segregation because these students are more often placed in restrictive settings, suspended, and expelled. Instead of spending time in the classroom learning with their peers, they may make contact with the school-to-prison pipeline. 

Despite the requirement to track disproportionality, the question of how states should actually do so remained. Without a standard approach for measuring, states’ findings did not reflect reality. 

We know that, nationally, Black students are 40 percent more likely, and American Indian or Alaska Native students are 70 percent more likely, to be identified as having disabilities than their peers. When examining disproportionalities among specific disability categories, Black students are also more than twice as likely to receive an “emotional disturbance” or “intellectual disability” designation as any other group. 

Yet, in 2010, only two percent of districts were identified as having significant disproportionality, and, according to a 2013 Government Accountability Office report, nearly half of all states during the 2010-11 school year did not require any districts to address this issue. 

The same report recommended that the Department of Education develop a standard approach for defining significant disproportionality. The department did so in 2016 through its Equity in IDEA regulations, which set a common standard for states to measure disproportionality, clarified states’ responsibilities for addressing disproportionality in discipline, and provided states flexibility in how to use funds to address these issues. States had until July 1 of this year to comply. 

The department’s current proposal, though, would move that compliance date back by two years in order to, essentially, re-examine the approach of the Equity in IDEA regulations. This is an entirely unnecessary action given that the public and stakeholders weighed in on the issue during the 2016 rulemaking process. It is also an action that will create confusion for state and local education agencies that have begun the work to implement the regulations. 

Most importantly, it is unjust because it suggests, as the National Association of State Directors of Special Education wrote, “that the identification and redress of significant disproportionality can be put on hold.” 

It cannot and should not be on hold any longer. The ACLU and ACLU state affiliates from across the country communicated this position to the department in comments that strongly opposed the proposed delay. We instead called for swift and continued implementation of the Equity in IDEA regulations, which would demonstrate a strong commitment to addressing disproportionality as part of a broader effort toward educational equity. 

It’s important to remember that Congress passed the requirement to address significant disproportionality more than a decade ago, and since then state action has been inconsistent and inadequate. The Equity in IDEA regulations were designed to ensure consistency with enough built-in flexibility for states to implement them fairly. 

Delaying the compliance date is not a harmless administrative change. It means that states will continue to inconsistently and ineffectively measure significant disproportionality, and students — particularly of color — will suffer the consequences. Students can’t receive a proper education if they’re incorrectly identified as having a disability and inappropriately disciplined and removed from the classroom. 

Equity delayed is still equity denied.