2022 Policy Agenda

Protect immigrant survivors of workplace sexual assault.

Take steps to advance the safety and well-being of immigrants and migrant women in the workplace.

• Directing investigative branches of government agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Department of Labor, to prioritize investigations of reported workplace sexual assault, specifically in the agricultural context, service industry, and other settings with a high number of workers from marginalized or underserved communities.
• Ensuring timely access to employment authorization for victims eligible for immigration relief.
• Creating a referral process for EEOC investigation through cross-agency collaboration.

Ensure affordable and accessible mental health services are provided to migrant women.

• Access to quality, affordable and culturally sensitive mental health services should be available to all workers. Many migrant women workers face conditions that worsen mental health, such as harassment in the workplace, wage theft and lack of paid family leave. In addition to making changes to address the physical harms, employers should prioritize the mental health of their employees by ensuring that mental health services are available through employer-sponsored health insurance. Employees who are immigrants, Black, Brown and LGBTQIA often face additional barriers to accessing these services. Through Justice for Migrant Women’s Healing Voices program, which provided free mental health services for farmworkers, we learned firsthand how COVID-19 has exacerbated mental health challenges faced by the farmworker community. Both Congress and the Administration should take action to increase access to mental health services and hold employers accountable.   

Pass BE HEARD in the Workplace Act  

• The Bringing an End to Harassment by Enhancing Accountability and Rejecting Discrimination in the Workplace Act (BE HEARD in the Workplace Act) is the first comprehensive federal legislation to address workplace harassment in the wake of #MeToo. It is bold legislation that responds to the needs of working people, and sets out a vision for what it means to appropriately respond to—and prevent—all forms of harassment, including sexual assault in the workplace.

Address gender steering and the gender wage gap, which is particularly prevalent for migrant and seasonal women workers.   

• Gender steering occurs when a person is pushed into or not considered for entire jobs or specific assignments based on their gender identity. For the LGBTQIA community and people who identify as women, this can have a particularly negative impact, limiting opportunities professionally and economically. Gender steering is particularly pervasive for women of color who are being recruited to come and work in the United States, oftentimes in lower-paid sectors, as they are not considered for jobs that do not align with stereotypical “women’s work.” Across the Administration, better enforcement of anti-discrimination laws is necessary to hold employers accountable for making hiring decisions based on the intersection of race and gender identity.  
• Decades of a stagnant gender wage gap mean that women, and the families supported by their income, have disproportionately lower incomes and are therefore at a disadvantage in facing the economic and health consequences of the ongoing pandemic.  Latinas are among those that face the widest wage gap. Recent data that includes both full-time, year-round workers as well as part-time workers, shows that, on average, Latinas make just 49 cents for every dollar made by white, non-Hispanic men. Many migrant women work seasonally or work multiple part-time jobs, making it crucial to calculate data that is not limited to full-time, year-round workers. In fact, wage gap calculations that exclude part-time workers leave out an estimated 33 million workers. The data still, however, is not reflective of the experiences of Afro-Latinas, transgender and gender non-conforming community members. 

Provide a pathway to citizenship for essential workers.

• It is beyond past time to fix the nation’s immigration system by providing legal status and a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. who have endured years, and in some cases decades, of marginalization, exploitation and abuse because of their imigration status. This includes providing a pathway to citizenship for essential workers, many of whom are low paid women workers.