American Civil Liberties Union

Last week, Pentagon officials got a few steps closer to recognizing what those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have known for years: servicewomen fight on the battlefield alongside their male counterparts, despite a longstanding rule barring them from being assigned to units that engage in direct ground combat. The Defense Department didn't altogether scrap the rules officially banning women from being assigned to such units, but it did loosen them. Under the new rules, women will be allowed to serve in some jobs — though not infantry, armor, or special operations forces — at the battalion level — that is, closer to combat than had previously been permitted. To the Pentagon's credit, it scrapped the infamous ban on women serving in units that are physically "co-located" with ground combat units, recognizing that the policy has become "irrelevant" on the modern battlefield. Now, 14,000 new jobs and assignment opportunities are open to servicewomen, though 238,000 positions still remain closed across all the armed services.

Today the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the most significant case about the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) and sex discrimination in employment since the landmark 2003 case Nevada Dep’t of Human Resources v. Hibbs. The case is Coleman v. Maryland Court of Appeals and, like Hibbs, it concerns the constitutionality of a provision of the FMLA, signed by President Clinton in his first act in office in 1993.

It may seem obvious that all workers are entitled to a work environment free from sex discrimination and to the wages guaranteed to them by law. But for laborers who come to this country to work temporarily under the H-2B visa program, the ability to enforce these basic rights is often out of reach.

This was the case for three of our clients who came to North Carolina from Mexico to work in the seafood processing industry. According to allegations they made in charges of discrimination and a class action lawsuit, they were limited by their employer to picking crab meat, while men were given a range of other work, and were given much more work than the women. In addition, our lawsuit claimed that their employer paid both men and women H-2B workers less than the wages promised to them, and failed to reimburse them for the travel and visa expenses they incurred, as the H-2B program requires.

More than 30 years after Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, employers still engage in two kinds of pregnancy-related sex discrimination. First, they discriminate outright against workers who get pregnant — firing them or refusing to promote them when they need to take time off for pregnancy-related care and childbirth, and forcing them off the job by refusing to accommodate some women’s temporary restrictions on heavy lifting or other physical job duties. Second, employers discriminate against women workers more generally, by firing or refusing to hire or promote women based on stereotypical assumptions that women in a certain age bracket will — or should — get pregnant, have children, and cost the employer money by leaving the workplace or shifting to a less work-intensive “mommy track.”