Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Cross-posted from ACS Blog

You may have missed it in the flurry of news-making by the Supreme Court this week, but on Monday, five of the Justices gave early Christmas presents to defendants accused of employment discrimination, when the Court handed down important decisions in two Title VII cases: Vance v. Ball State University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar. In both Vance and Nassar, the 5-4 decisions ignored the realities of the workplace and the ways in which employment discrimination and harassment play out every day. Placing new obstacles in the path of workers seeking to vindicate their rights, the Court set aside the longstanding interpretations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the agency charged with enforcing Title VII), and closed out a term in which the Court repeatedly limited the ability of individuals to challenge the actions of powerful corporations. 

Justice Alito wrote the Vance decision. Prior cases have held that when a plaintiff shows she was sexually harassed, or racially harassed, or harassed on some other unlawful basis by a supervisor, her employer is liable, unless the employer can prove that the plaintiff unreasonably failed to take advantage of a process that the employer provided for addressing harassment. An employer is only liable for harassment by a co-worker, however, when a plaintiff can show that the employer was negligent in controlling working conditions — a far tougher standard. Vance posed the question of who is a supervisor: Is it only someone who has the authority to hire, fire, or take other tangible employment actions? Or is it anyone who oversees and directs the plaintiff’s work on a day-to-day basis?

It's a fitting question to ask this week, which marks the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the landmark law that established the first federal minimum wage. And it's a particularly important question for women, who make up nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers nationwide.

The answer, though, depends a lot on where you live. A majority of states follow the federal minimum wage, which is not scheduled to rise even though it has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for almost four years — and for tipped workers in states that follow the federal standard, the minimum cash wage has been frozen at a shockingly low $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years. But in states like Washington, Colorado, Ohio, and Vermont, the minimum wage will automatically rise in January 2014 to keep up with inflation, and minimum wage increases recently enacted in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island will also begin to take effect in 2014. 

To make it easy for you to find out what’s happening with the minimum wage in your state, the National Women's Law Center just released this handy interactive map. 

You can click on any state to see its minimum wage and tipped minimum wage, along with the share of minimum wage workers who are women, the next scheduled increase in the minimum wage, and any recent action on the minimum wage in the state legislature. 

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius,  the Court upheld the constitutionality of two major provisions of the ACA: the individual mandate and the Medicaid eligibility expansion. However, the Court made one very significant change to the terms of the Medicaid provision: It held that the federal government could not condition a state's current federal Medicaid funding on participation in the coverage expansion, thereby giving states the choice to opt-out of covering more people through Medicaid. 

Today, Medicaid programs in all states cover low-income individuals with disabilities, seniors, children, pregnant women, and parents. But federal money provided through the ACA will enable states to reach people younger than 65 whose income is below 138 percent of the federal poverty guideline ($15,856 annually for an individual; $26, 951 for a family of three in 2012). 

For the first time, low-income childless adults will have access to Medicaid coverage in many states. 

If all states take this federal money, approximately 15.1 million currently uninsured adults [PDF] would newly qualify for Medicaid coverage. Covering more people through the Medicaid program is especially important for low-income women who make up over 60 percent of uninsured women in the U.S. and are four times more likely than higher income women to report fair or poor health.