Efforts to prevent employment discrimination across the country are a patchwork of federal and state law protections and enforcement. At the federal level, large employers are prohibited from various types of discrimination, with enforcement efforts spearheaded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. States are left to fill in the gaps among the many federal laws with their own protections. Virginia law does not do much to fill those gaps.
In this report, we set out to answer two questions:
- How do other states’ efforts to curb employment discrimination compare to Virginia’s lackluster laws and enforcement mechanisms? Virginia’s primary anti-discrimination law is in the Virginia Human Rights Act, which only prohibits employers with between 6-14 employees from firing someone on the basis of a protected status. The only statewide enforcement authority exists as a division of the Office of the Attorney General, which cannot order relief or litigate complaints they find substantiated. We compared these provisions with the enforcement mechanisms in other states in our 50 State Survey, and found the Virginia is lagging far behind in meaningful enforcement efforts.
- What types of employment discrimination have people reported to the ACLU of Virginia? We wanted to get a sense of what issues people have been raising in this area. We analyzed and summarized intakes going back to 2013 to get a glimpse into the types of and bases for employment discrimination happening throughout the Commonwealth. Our data is self-reported and not comprehensive but provides an important window into the experiences of Virginia’s workers.
From all of the intakes we reviewed and our comparisons to other states, one thing is clear: employment discrimination is happening throughout Virginia, and the Commonwealth is not doing enough to combat it. We urge policymakers to take steps to provide better protections for Virginia’s employees, like strengthening our state-level anti-discrimination law, creating an independent state agency that can enforce this law, and collecting and reporting data annually. Anti-discrimination protections are too important of an area of law for Virginia to remain at the bottom of the country.
Date
Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 2:45pm
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Every legislative session, the ACLU of Virginia heads to the Capitol to defend and expand the civil rights of all Virginians. This year, we prioritized bills that would reduce racial disparities in our criminal justice system, eliminate discriminatory voting practices, and achieve gender equity across the Commonwealth. We worked with various grassroots organizations, community members and lawmakers to push these initiatives forward.
We would not be able to do the work that we do without the help of our partners, donors, members and supporters. This End of Session Report is a summary of how our priority legislation and bills we watched fared this General Assembly session.
Check out our 2019 Virginia Legislative Report below!
Date
Wednesday, May 22, 2019 - 4:45pm
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2019 Virginia Session Confessions
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In Virginia and across the country, women are being incarcerated at rates that are increasing much more rapidly than men.
Women comprised 15.3% of the average daily population in Virginia’s local and regional jails in 2014, about one percent higher than the percentage of women incarcerated in local jails nationally. This represents a 32% increase between 2010 and 2014—more than double the national increase during the same time period. In contrast, the average number of men inmates only increased about 4 % between 2010 and 2014.
These statistics give rise to a few critical questions:
- Why is the incarceration of women increasing in Virginia at much higher rates than the incarceration of men?
- Are there gender-specific factors that are not being addressed through ongoing legislative and policy efforts to reduce Virginia’s prison and jail populations? If so, what are they?
- And what reforms must be made to ensure that women are included in our efforts to promote safe communities while reducing the number of Virginians sentenced to prison and jail time?
The over-incarceration of women is a symptom of a complex network of social barriers, economic inequality, reproductive injustice, and racial and sexual discrimination deeply woven into our society.
This paper is intended to be the first step in a long campaign to reform the criminal justice system for all women in Virginia.
Watch the press conference marking the launch of this report
here, which includes powerful stories by
Kemba Smith, author of "Poster Child: The Kemba Smith Story" and advocate for incarcerated women, and Heidi Christiansen, advocate and resident of
Friends of Guest House.
Date
Monday, August 27, 2018 - 10:45am
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Criminal Legal Reform
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