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Last spring, as people across the globe raced to shut themselves indoors and shelter away from the threat of COVID-19, meatpacking workers in America suddenly found themselves exposed, vulnerable, and directly at the front line of the disease’s spread. By early April, the coronavirus was tearing through plants in states like Iowa, South Dakota, Texas, and Nebraska, infecting tens of thousands of mostly immigrant workers who’d been drawn to remote towns and cities by the meatpacking industry and its jobs.   Nervous health officials urged some hotspot plants to temporarily shut down, warning that crowded and enclosed processing rooms were vectors for the disease and were facilitating its spread into nearby communities. Recognizing the threat that the outbreaks posed to their operations – and their bottom line – some producers began implementing rudimentary protections for their workers including paid sick leave, on-site testing, and increased spacing on production lines.   Others, however, did little to protect workers, even after the scale of the danger they faced was obvious and undeniable. Noah’s Ark Processors, a plant operating in Hastings, Nebraska, is a glaring example of the dangerous and abusive treatment that meatpacking workers have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This week the ACLU filed suit against Noah’s Ark, alleging that the company pressures workers to remain on shift even when they become symptomatic, isn’t replacing blood-stained masks during their long shifts, has done nothing to facilitate social distancing inside the plant, and is failing to provide onsite testing to identify emerging infection clusters.   “Noah’s Ark has refused to implement even the most basic protections against a coronavirus surge in the plant,” said Spencer Amdur, an attorney at the ACLU. “At this point in the pandemic, there is no excuse for failing to do even the bare minimum to protect workers and the surrounding community.”  Alma was one of the workers on the production line at Noah’s Ark and is a plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit. After emigrating from Cuba in 2012, she was hired to work in the plant a few years ago. It was a tough job. Her hands and wrists often ached from grueling hours spent on the “kill floor” – an enclosed room where cow carcasses are butchered and prepared for cold storage – but it paid decently. She and her husband Antonio, also a Noah’s Ark employee, were raising four children, and the family needed the money. (Note: the ACLU is using pseudonyms for them due to their fear of retaliation by management.)   Like many meatpacking plants, the majority of the plant’s workforce were immigrants, and Isabel says that even before COVID-19 emerged she and Antonio were unsettled by the way management treated them. But things took a sharp turn for the worse when the pandemic began.   “People were scared, but [management] made it seem like it wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “The first thing they said was that nobody could miss work. They would say that [COVID-19] was just nonsense. Even when things got more serious, they didn’t care.”   Then, in late April, workers at the plant began to fall ill.

As of now, we know the status of two of the three branches of the federal government. We have President-elect Joe Biden in the executive, and an even more conservative majority in the Supreme Court with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The future of Congress is still unknown as we await the results of two runoffs in Georgia that could hand control of the Senate to either party.  Even before the results of those Senate races are in, we know that the fate of civil rights and civil liberties hangs in the balance. Civil rights protections previously defended by a narrow majority in the Supreme Court could be in jeopardy. At the same time, the Biden administration will have the opportunity to roll back Trump-era assaults like the Muslim ban; it might also get a chance at its own appointments.  On At Liberty this week, we’re joined by our National Legal Director David Cole, who helps us to understand and forecast the impact of a Biden presidency and the most conservative Supreme Court in more than half a century.

Like pretty much everything in 2020, Trans Day of Remembrance is going to be different this year. It’s going virtual. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that transgender people are still being murdered for being who we are. The list of names keeps growing. This year is the deadliest ever, and it isn’t even over yet.  Thirty-four trans people have been killed since January. The real number is probably even higher. Trans people are often misgendered by law enforcement or don’t report attacks, so we don’t even know about most of the violence that happens to our sisters. Most of the deaths this year were of Black trans women. Many were sex workers. I am not surprised. As a trans woman of color and a former sex worker myself, I know what it’s like to be targeted for who you are, and to not have anyone to call for help because your job is illegal.

Trump’s days as president are coming to an end, but his efforts to weaponize the census continue — and could impact our democracy for the next decade. We’re going to the Supreme Court on Nov. 30 to make sure that doesn’t happen.  If the census fight feels like a case of déjà vu, there’s a good reason. We already took the Trump administration to court to block its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court agreed with us and ruled that the citizenship question was illegal. Because of that victory, the census proceeded this year as it has for the last 70 years, free of the discriminatory citizenship question.  Still, the fight continues. In spite of squarely losing on the citizenship question, the Trump administration tried again in July to weaponize the census. This time, it issued a memo directing the secretary of commerce to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count that determines how many congressional seats each state gets. This would be an unconstitutional and radical break with the 230-year history of the census, and could reshape the Electoral College map for years to come.

Each year on Nov. 20, Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) gives us an opportunity to remember and honor the trans and non-binary people who have been killed at the hands of transphobic and transmisogynistic violence. In 2020, over 350 trans and non-binary people have been killed around the world, the large marjority of whom were trans women and trans feminine people. Within the United States, there have been at least 28 documented cases of trans and non-binary people who have been murdered this year, with Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide (TvT) reporting that almost 80 percent were people of color. While TDOR largely focuses on those we have lost to murder, it is also important to recognize trans and non-binary people who have died because of medical neglect, lack of access to shelter, suicide, and other preventable causes. This increasing and alarming rate of death has been labeled a pandemic, and continues to impact trans and non-binary communities, especially Black trans and non-binary communities, in every corner of the United States.  In addition to high murder rates, trans and non-binary people also face widespread physical and sexual violence, especially from law enforcement. There is a long history of trans and non-binary people being targeted by the police and the criminal legal system as a whole. As maya finoh, a Black non-binary abolitionist and cultural worker, reminds us, “The [U.S. criminal legal system] was absolutely designed to warehouse us, to surveil us, to police us…specifically [those of] us who are Black…immigrants…queer, trans, et cetera.” Research conducted by the NYC Anti-Violence Project concluded that trans and non-binary people are seven times more likely to experience physical police violence as compared to cisgender people. Black trans and non-binary people continue to experience the highest rates of police brutality and incarceration in the LGBTQ community, and are even criminalized for defending themselves against anti-Black, transphobic, and transmisogynyistic attacks. 

In early October, the United States Labor Department reported that women were leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men. A few months earlier, a report from McKinsey Global revealed that while women made up 43 percent of the workforce, they had borne 56 percent of COVID-related job losses. This data — and much more — led one news source to call this moment “America’s First Female Recession.” This week, Colleen Ammerman joined At Liberty to discuss why this is happening, and what we can do about it. Ammerman is the director of Harvard Business School’s Gender Initiative. She is also the co-author of an upcoming book Glass Half Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work. While disparities in pay and access to power in the workplace are not new, Ammerman says the divides are now starker than ever because of COVID-19: “What we’re seeing the pandemic do is really just both reveal and entrench some of these inequalities, both along racial and gender lines.”

After four years of attacks on our reproductive rights and health by the Trump administration and the anti-abortion legislators it has emboldened around the country, there is much to repair. When President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris take office, their administration must make it a top priority to not just undo the damage, but to take bold, visionary steps to make reproductive health care — including abortion — accessible to all, regardless of their income or ZIP code. Congress, too, has a key role to play in ensuring that everyone is afforded the dignity to make our own decisions about our lives. Here are just a few of the many items that should top our elected officials’ to-do list: Reverse dangerous Trump administration regulations targeting reproductive health care, including:

One of the simplest joys of expecting a baby is sharing the news with other people. That wasn’t the case for Steven van Soeren, a product designer for Disney’s streaming service, when his wife became pregnant. “You shouldn’t have a kid,” one Disney coworker told him, according to allegations in his complaint. “I don’t know why he decided to have a kid,” said another within earshot of van Soeren. Objections to van Soeren becoming a father weren’t limited to cruel remarks. Shortly after van Soeren returned from two weeks of paternity leave, he was fired. Van Soeren thought that was wrong — and illegal. He sued his former employer, but a federal court dismissed van Soeren’s case last month, reasoning that his firing wasn’t unlawful discrimination because van Soeren himself had not been pregnant. The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have disagreed. She was well known for her legal strategy arguing cases on behalf of men to demonstrate how sex discrimination harms us all. Ginsburg wanted everyone to have equal opportunity to work and participate in family life according to their own needs and wants, regardless of their gender. She also knew that in order for women to enjoy full equity outside the home, society would have to empower men to share the responsibilities within it. That meant breaking free from traditional gender roles and discriminatory laws that dictated that caregiving was a woman’s job — and never a man’s. Ginsburg’s view of the law prevailed, in 1975 and beyond. In a 2003 decision authored by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist (and joined by Ginsburg, by that point a member of the court herself), the Supreme Court noted that by denying men paternity leave or discouraging them from taking it, employers “created a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination that forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver.” Congress, it held, was rightly empowered to address sex discrimination of this kind. Yet the van Soeren decision demonstrates that existing federal law is insufficient. Local laws have filled the gap — New York City, for example, added express protections against discrimination for caregivers, regardless of gender or one’s ability to become pregnant, in 2016. In June, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would protect all mothers, fathers, and other family caregivers from employment discrimination. That’s important because caregiving isn’t just about parenting. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, which enforces local laws against caregiving discrimination, regularly receives complaints from New Yorkers who say they’ve been penalized for caring for their spouses, parents, and other loved ones. One man reported losing his job after telling his supervisor that he needed to take a week off to care for his wife after an illness. He says his supervisor laughed at him for doing “the woman’s job” and then replaced him while he was out caring for his wife. Another New Yorker said she asked to work remotely from her mother’s home in another state while her mother went through cancer treatment. She was surprised when the request was denied; she worked for an international company, where teams were spread across multiple offices and collaborate remotely, and other employees had been allowed to work remotely for personal travel or a spouse’s sabbatical. And though she wasn’t able to care for her mother, she was punished simply for making the request, coming under increased scrutiny and, ultimately, laid off while others without caregiving responsibilities were allowed to keep their jobs. Fortunately, both workers were protected by New York City’s law. But without nationwide express protections from caregiver discrimination in all its forms, the van Soeren decision sends a terrible message — and one that could not land at a worse time. Women are at the center of the most unequal recession in modern American history. The back-to-school season — without physical school reopenings in many parts of the country — has worsened the situation: Of 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the workforce in September, 80 percent were women. This shouldn’t be surprising. Parents, overwhelmingly mothers, have had no alternative but to drop out of the labor market to manage their children’s education. This decision is likely the result of women’s entrenched income inequality, leading many different-sex couples to try to preserve the earning potential of the partner who makes more. In most cases, that’s the man. Other mothers have had the choice made for them, either because they work in jobs that can’t be done from home or because their employers penalized them for having children at home while they worked. Coupled with the already disproportionately high rates of unemployment for women since the start of the pandemic, it may take decades for women to recover. And these disparities are far worse for women working in low-wage positions, Black women, and other women of color. All of this explains why Ginsburg might well have decided to take on a case like van Soeren’s. As Ginsburg famously said, “Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.” Now more than ever, lawmakers across the country must work to make Ginsburg’s vision a reality by ensuring caregiving discrimination protections for all — regardless of gender.

This piece was originally published on Advocate.com.