ORLANDO, Florida — Elizabeth Evju’s cellphone was ringing nonstop on December 6, 2018.

Evju was at work, serving soft drinks to guests at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park that morning, and couldn’t answer. It wasn’t until lunchtime that she saw the text message.

“This is Chaplain Glen and I’m trying to get ahold of you. It’s an emergency, please call me back.”

The 40-year-old mother of six couldn’t imagine what it was all about. She would learn, soon enough, that her partner of 13 years, Shawn Knowles, had been crushed in a work accident.

Knowles didn’t survive, the chaplain told Evju on the phone. “I just lost it,” she said, sobbing as she remembered the conversation. “I was screaming and crying and screaming. I couldn’t even speak.”

Knowles worked at a countertop factory and had arrived early that day. He was cleaning out the drainage ditch that collects granite dust from a 28,000-pound marble-cutting machine. As he hosed down the ditch, he stepped into the path of the machine’s robotic arm before it circled back to switch tools.

The area wasn’t roped off, investigators said afterward; nothing kept workers from taking the wrong step.

No one saw what happened next, according to police, but one of Knowles’s coworkers, Brady Claiborne, found him lying in the drainage ditch around 8:40 am, his arm bloody and twisted into an “unnatural position.” Claiborne yelled for someone to call 911. Two coworkers rushed over. Together, they lifted Knowles out of the ditch and turned on a heater to keep him warm until an ambulance arrived. He was still breathing.

Less than an hour later, on his way to the hospital, Knowles died. He was 44.

“It destroyed us. It really did,” Evju said. His death was so distressing that she couldn’t work for a month and almost lost their home when she fell behind on the mortgage payments. One of their six children tried to kill themselves. Their 11-year-old son still has dreams that his father is alive.

Knowles’s accident was one of 3,203 that led to a death or “catastrophe” — defined by the US Department of Labor as hospitalizations of three or more workers — and triggered an investigation by safety inspectors at the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the first three and a half years of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to the agency’s enforcement data.

In 2019, OSHA’s safety inspectors conducted 962 investigations into fatal or catastrophic workplace incidents — the highest number since the agency began publishing the data in 2011.

As these incidents mount, however, the Trump administration has scaled back OSHA inspections, which research has shown to lower injury rates. The agency conducted slightly fewer safety inspections during the first three years of Trump’s presidency than during a comparable period at the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, even though the labor force grew by 16 percent, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the agency’s inspection data.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, OSHA has been cutting back even more, conducting only 5,127 inspections since March 13, when Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency. That’s a drop of about two-thirds compared to the same period last year.

The slowdown in inspections could prove dangerous for millions of workers: A Public Integrity analysis shows the vast majority of deaths and catastrophes have occurred at workplaces that weren’t inspected by OSHA.

A case in point is Majestic Marble & Granite, the countertop factory where Knowles worked. Before the 2018 accident, it had never been inspected by OSHA, records show, despite being part of a hazardous industry. Under federal law, the agency doesn’t need to visit every workplace — an impossibility given that it has never had more than 1,500 inspectors to cover millions of workplaces — but under Trump, scrutiny is even less likely.

The lax scrutiny comes as Trump continues to trim the regulatory powers of federal agencies. Under his watch, the Labor Department has systematically weakened rules meant to protect workers’ pay, retirement, and safety. The department, for example, scaled back a rule to extend overtime pay for millions of workers. It also tried to change pay rules to let employers pocket workers’ tips — a move later undone by Congress.

The department also has been slow to hire and replace inspectors at OSHA; their number fell from 952 in 2016 to 862 in January, the lowest number of inspectors in the agency’s history, according to the National Employment Law Project.

Staffing has since gone down to 761 inspectors, according to the Labor Department.

Debbie Berkowitz, who served as an OSHA policy adviser under Obama, said the administration is “starving” the agency of the staff it needs to keep workers safe.

“This will have lasting consequences,” said Berkowitz, now NELP’s director of safety and health. “It’s undermining the effectiveness of the agency.”

The human cost of less regulation

There was a time when deaths and maimings at workplaces were common. During the Industrial Revolution, factories sprang up in the Northeast, and working conditions there were brutal. Fires, explosions, and equipment malfunctions were frequent. Workers died, and employers had no legal obligation to protect them.

In 1860, a cotton factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, collapsed and killed about 145 workers. That led the state to pass the nation’s first law requiring factory safety inspections. New Jersey, New York, and a handful of other states followed.

This series was made possible through a collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, a DC-based nonprofit newsroom. Get updates on their work. You can also support Vox with a financial contribution. Learn more.

It wasn’t until the progressive New Deal era that the federal government got involved. In 1934, Frances Perkins, the first labor secretary, opened an agency to help states craft and improve workplace safety laws.

Then, under pressure from labor unions, Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. It required all private companies — for the first time — to provide workers with a safe and healthy work environment. OSHA was created to enforce the law.

While it doesn’t inspect every workplace, OSHA is the primary agency to enforce workplace safety laws in 29 states. (The other 21 states have their own enforcement programs that must comply with federal law.)

Still, even with OSHA in place, critics say workplaces across the country remain dangerous, triggering an annual average of about 880 fatal or catastrophic investigations from 2012 to 2019.

The death toll is “outrageously high,” says Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, an advocacy group. “With all the technology we have, those rates should be going down much more dramatically.”

One reason for the high number of deaths and catastrophes is that the workforce was growing before the pandemic hit, so there were more workers at risk of getting hurt.

But Goldstein and other workplace safety experts believe more workers are dying because OSHA inspections have grown rarer.

During the first three years under Trump, OSHA conducted about 81,000 safety inspections — a 4.7 percent decrease from about 85,000 conducted during the last three years of Obama’s presidency, according to a Public Integrity analysis of the agency’s inspection data.

“Unless someone dies at a workplace or there’s some significant accident, [the employer] is very unlikely to be inspected now,” said a former OSHA official under Obama, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press at his new job.

But Congress hasn’t cut OSHA’s enforcement budget; instead, it has given the agency slightly more funding than the administration has asked for. It earmarked $576.8 million for fiscal year 2020 — $19.3 million more than requested.

Former OSHA officials say the decrease in inspectors has more to do with the federal hiring freeze imposed during Trump’s first year in the office. Dozens of inspectors left their jobs in the months following his inauguration, and the Labor Department has been slow to replace them.

OSHA “has done a poor job filling the vacancies,” said Rebecca Reindel, safety and health director for the AFL-CIO labor federation.

Filling vacancies is the first step to rebuilding the agency, a task a future administration would likely have to take on, Reindel said. She also would like to see OSHA hire more employees to update safety standards — a process that can take years. Ramping up criminal prosecutions of negligent employers is also critical, she added.

“Going after those especially bad actors sends a strong message,” Reindel said.

What happens when OSHA stays away

After Knowles’s death, OSHA cited Majestic Marble & Granite for not putting up guardrails around the drainage ditch and not blocking off the area around the stone-cutting machine while it was on.

Inspectors said the robotic arm likely pushed Knowles and pinned him against a steel I-beam nearby, crushing his arm and torso. The company settled two OSHA citations and paid a fine of $12,199 — down from a proposed penalty of $18,564 — in May 2019. 

Evju was furious when she found out. “I couldn’t believe they felt like that’s what his life was worth — not even close,” she said.

Majestic Marble & Granite is just a few miles south of downtown Orlando, on a busy street lined with auto body shops and personal storage units. The building has a showroom up front and a workshop out back. That’s where employees design, cut, and polish the countertops.

The owner of the company, Scott Hanes, declined to talk about what happened on December 6, 2018.

“I can’t comment on that,” Hanes said in the parking lot one February afternoon. “I need to protect my business.”

At the end of the workday, employees ambled toward their cars, wearing grease-stained, neon yellow T-shirts. They, too, didn’t want to talk.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” said one man as he got into his pickup truck. “That brings up some really bad memories of trying to save someone’s life and not being able to.”

Another man said he gave a statement to police and didn’t want to discuss it further.

Majestic Marble & Granite did not have a history of safety complaints or violations, according to OSHA. That’s probably why the agency never visited the business — it often takes a worker to file a complaint or die for OSHA to investigate. But the agency randomly inspects companies in dangerous industries, and the stone fabrication industry was part of its high-hazard safety enforcement program until the administration ended it, shortly after Trump took office. It’s more likely that OSHA would have inspected Majestic Marble & Granite if Trump hadn’t abolished the program. (The administration reinstated a weaker version of it earlier this year.)

The White House declined to comment on Public Integrity’s findings and referred questions to the Labor Department. 

Megan Sweeney, a Labor Department spokesperson, said the number of inspections began to rise again in fiscal year 2019 and was on pace to rise even higher in 2020 until the pandemic hit.

“OSHA is working around the clock to protect America’s workers, especially during the pandemic,” Sweeney wrote in a statement.

But that’s cold comfort for Evju. “I feel like if [OSHA] had actually investigated the company to make sure that it was safe, then my husband would still be here,” she said.

Justin Harrington’s story is similar to Knowles’s. Harrington had been looking forward to a career in construction. The 27-year-old New Englander knew how to handle a forklift and wanted to get a special license to drive boom trucks and bucket trucks. He never got the chance.

On January 18, 2018, Harrington died while driving an excavator in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was digging out the foundation of a house to renovate the basement. None of his coworkers had arrived yet, so no one saw what happened. The owner of the contracting company, Michael MacEachern, found him pinned against a steel beam and called the police.

Harrington didn’t make it. “I’ll never forget that day,” said his mother, Rena Harrington.

MacEachern did not respond to a request for comment.

After Harrington’s death, OSHA sent an inspector to the work site and cited the company, Stoneworks, for not properly training employees to recognize and avoid hazards. Stoneworks settled the case for $3,492. As with Majestic Marble & Granite, the agency had never inspected the company until Harrington died, records show.

Since January 2013, OSHA has conducted more than 6,800 investigations into workplaces that had a fatal or catastrophic incident. The vast majority of them — about 91 percent — had not been inspected in the previous 10 years, according to a Public Integrity analysis of the agency’s enforcement data.

Research shows that OSHA inspections have a significant impact on safety. In 2012, for example, researchers at Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley found that companies subject to the agency’s random inspections showed a 9.4 percent decrease in injury rates compared with uninspected ones. They also found no evidence of any added cost to inspected companies from complying with regulations.

In 2010, researchers with the RAND Corporation analyzed workers’ compensation data in Pennsylvania and found that OSHA inspections were linked to a sharp decline in reported injuries at medium-size companies. Inspections that led to citations with penalties played a role in reducing injuries by an average of 19 to 24 percent each year for the two years following each inspection.

“Inspections work,” said Reindel of the AFL-CIO. “If an employer thinks they won’t get inspected, they will take fewer steps to protect workers.”

Waiting for something to shift

It’s been 19 months since Evju got the news about Knowles, and she still cries about it every day — in the shower, on her way to work in her Buick. “It doesn’t get any easier,” she said.

On her days off — Wednesdays and Thursdays — Evju lies on the couch, too exhausted and sad to do anything. Sometimes she musters the energy to clean her house. The family lives in a trailer park called Rock Springs, where she and Knowles bought a three-bedroom mobile home in 2017. 

During a recent visit by a Public Integrity reporter, her home looked tidy but worn. Her daughter’s dolls were piled up in a corner. Three goldfish swam in circles. Evju pointed to a cluster of golf-ball-size rips in the beige carpet. Their dog, Smoke, had anxiously chewed through the fabric after Knowles died.

“He’s still grieving,” Evju said as Smoke napped in an open crate in the living room. The old Staffordshire Terrier is just one reminder of the life that Evju once had. There are many, including the small whiteboard where Knowles wrote her a note in blue marker — something he often did. “Hay Baby I love U!! For Ever.” Evju cracked a smile, remembering how he always misspelled “hey.”

Things are hard financially as well. Without two incomes, Evju works extra hours and sometimes doesn’t return home until 1 am. She feels like she’s barely hanging on to her job because she often needs to take unpaid time off when a child is ill.

“I’m the only one who can take care of my kids, so if we’re out sick for a week I can’t go to work,” said Evju, who was furloughed from her $14-an-hour job at Disney during the pandemic.

Evju does get modest workers’ compensation payments related to Knowles’s accident, but the $60 a week can only go so far. She relies on food stamps, and her children are on Medicaid. Evju can’t afford the premiums for her health insurance, so she has none.

The older children are pitching in. Fifteen-year-old Braden has taken up “house mom” duties. He helps watch the younger kids, cooks dinner for them, and often puts them to bed. Seventeen-year-old Emily goes to a special high school with flexible hours, which allows her to work part time at a nursing home. She helps pay the bills.

Some days, Evju convinces herself she can be happy again. Most of the time, she’s angry. Angry that Knowles’s company never contacted her to offer condolences. Angry that OSHA had never inspected it until the accident. Reminders of that December morning are everywhere.

“There can be a certain smell or some small thing that brings everything back, like I just got hit in the gut with a ton of bricks,” Evju said. “And everything comes flooding back, like I just got that phone call.”

On Wednesday, something unheard of happened on the 2020 Democratic debate stage: Moderators asked candidates what they would do about high child care costs and the lack of paid parental leave in the US.

It just took five debates and a panel of all-women moderators for this to happen.

Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for the Washington Post, pointed out that child care and paid family leave are important issues to many voters.

“Here in Georgia, the average price of infant daycare can be as much as $8,500 per child per year. That’s more than in-state tuition at a public college in Georgia. Mr. Yang, what would you do as president to ease that financial burden?” she asked.

Yang responded by saying that the US is one of only two countries without mandated paid family leave laws (the other being Papua New Guinea). That’s not entirely true. There are a handful of small countries without it, such as Suriname and Lesotho. But he was pointing to a big problem: The US is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t guarantee new parents paid time off.

His solution? Universal basic income, giving families up to $2,000 a month to spend on child care. Or with the money, a parent could stay home and care for the child, an idea he was eager to push.

“We should not be pushing everyone to leave the home and go to the work force,” Yang responded. “Many parents see that tradeoff and say if they leave the home and go to work, they’d be spending all that money on child care anyway. In many cases, it would we better if the parent stayed with the child.”

Parker then turned to Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris.

“Senator Harris, you’re one of the candidates proposing legislation to guarantee up to six months of paid family leave,” she said. “And Senator Klobuchar, you’re one of the candidates proposing up to three months. I want to hear from both of you on this, starting with you, Senator Klobuchar. Why three months?” 

Klobuchar threw shade at Harris’s proposal, by suggesting that six months of paid family leave would cost the government too much money and that three months is good enough.

“We have an obligation as a party to be fiscally responsible,” she answered. “Yes, think big, but make sure we have people’s backs and are honest with them about what we can pay for.”

Klobuchar is one of several 2020 candidates who endorse Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s signature legislative proposal, the Family Act. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg have, too. That plan provides three months of paid leave to families, with up to 66 percent of each worker’s income covered by a small increase to payroll taxes (paid by workers and employers). Both parents could each use the benefit when they choose to.

In October, Harris went even further than her peers and proposed the most generous paid family leave plan yet: six months. That would put the United States in line with most of the world’s developed countries and with what researchers believe to be an ideal amount of time. It would also probably cost a lot of money, and Harris has given few details about how it would be funded.

When Parker asked her how she would pay for it, Harris demurred. Instead she focused on the fact that caregiving is a job that usually falls to women, but that three months is not enough time for them to juggle all their responsibilities.

“Many women are having to make a very difficult choice about whether they’re going to leave a profession for which they have a passion to care for their family, or whether they’re going to give up a paycheck, which is part of what that family relies on,” she answered. “So six months paid family leave is meant to adjust to the reality of women’s lives today.”

Their answers didn’t add much to the debate — but it was the that question mattered.

Parental leave is an issue that matters to voters

Six months of paid parental leave may seem radical, but it’s really not. Researchers consider six months of paid parental leave ideal to strike a balance between a child’s health care needs and the needs of a parent’s employer.

The idea of a government-run program to provide parental leave is also well supported by voters. About 74 percent of registered US voters in 2016 said the government should require businesses to offer employees paid parental leave. When you break down poll numbers, the support is overwhelming across genders, political parties, and even income groups. 

Another survey shows that 82 percent of voters believe working mothers should get paid maternity leave. Whether the respondent was Republican or Democrat, male or female, it didn’t matter — a majority support the idea that both mothers and fathers should get paid time off.

In other words, it’s a safe political issue for Democrats and Republicans to tackle, if only Republicans weren’t so hesitant to make businesses pay part — or all — of the cost. Right now, under federal law, workers can take up to four months of leave after the birth or adoption of a child. But there is no requirement that it be paid.

Nearly every industrialized country in the world provides working mothers with at least three months of paid maternity leave — the minimum recommended by the United Nations’s International Labour Organization. In most of those countries, employers and employees pay a tax to fund the benefit. Canada has this type of system, which allows parents to take a year of leave while receiving 55 percent of their salary the entire time (up to 80 percent of wages are covered for low-income workers).

Some US businesses voluntarily offer paid parental leave to their workers, but only about one in 10 workers in the country get such a benefit from their employer. Low-wage workers are the least likely to receive it. In response to federal inaction on the issue, several states have started requiring employers to provide some paid leave: California, New York, and the District of Columbia are among those that do.

Research shows that paid-leave programs improve child health, promote gender equality, and help keep women in the workforce. Studies indicate that California’s paid-leave law, which went into effect in 2004, led to an increase in work hours and income for mothers with young children. And paid leave has been linked to lower poverty rates in 18 countries.

Coming up with an effective paid parental leave system in the United States isn’t hard. The hard part is getting Republicans to agree that businesses should pay for some of it. Harris and Klobuchar didn’t mention how they would persuade a potentially divided Congress to pass any paid-leave program if they made it to the White House. But getting presidential candidates to discuss parental leave at all is a pretty good start.

In a video that aired Thursday on Tucson’s KOLD news station, a white sheriff’s deputy is seen tackling and wrestling a black teen in foster care. The teen — an amputee with no arms or legs — repeatedly screams at the police officer to get off of him.

The sheriff’s deputy holds the boy in a headlock on the ground and curses in his face before arresting him for disorderly conduct. The deputy then screams at the teenager who was recording the scene, handcuffs him, and slams his head against the wall.

It was an extraordinary amount of violence against two defenseless youths — all in the span of eight minutes. The incident happened in September, but KOLD didn’t get a hold of the footage until this week.

According to KOLD, the Pima County sheriff’s deputy was responding to a call at a Tucson group home about a disruptive teenager. Yet his angry and violent response was striking, especially because the teens seemed to be behaving like, well, teenagers.

The sheriff’s office told KOLD that it is investigating the officer’s conduct, and state prosecutors have since dropped charges against the two youths. The incident is all too similar to other videos that have gone viral, showing police officers use excessive force against black men. But there was something particularly disturbing about watching a deputy mistreat such vulnerable children. As if they hadn’t been through enough.

Children in group homes have already experienced enough trauma

One of the most remarkable things about the latest incident was where it happened: in a group home for boys in foster care. These residential facilities are supposed to be safe places for some of country’s most troubled youths.

More than 23,000 children in the foster care system live in group homes like the one in Tucson. And they are far more likely to have experienced multiple forms of trauma in their short lives, according to research by the Casey Family Programs. For example, 55 percent have been physically abused, 40 percent have been sexually abused, 68 percent have been emotionally abused, and 62 percent have suffered a traumatic loss. A majority have mental health problems or physical disabilities.

Few details about the Tucson teenager have been released to protect his privacy, but KOLD said he was in a group home because he was abandoned by his parents. Little is also known about the group home where the incident took place, and there is no reason to believe there was abuse or neglect by caregivers.

However, reports of abuse and neglect of children in group homes are common. In Illinois, for example, a 2016 investigation by the Chicago Tribune described state taxpayer-funded group homes as “a system where caregivers often failed to provide basic care while regulators cloaked harm and death with secrecy and silence.”

The newspaper uncovered 1,311 cases of documented injuries, hundreds of which were not reported by the Illinois Department of Human Services. Residents were often deprived of food, forced to wear dirty clothing and restrained with duct tape.

The investigation prompted Congress to request and audit of group homes by the US Department of Health and Human Services. In 2018, the agency released its report, which found that children in these settings “often experienced serious injuries and medical conditions that resulted in emergency room visits.” The audits also revealed that 99 percent of those critical injuries were not reported to the appropriate law enforcement or state agencies, as required by law.

Foster children who live in residential facilities are already traumatized and at high-risk of abuse. These are children that need police protection, not mistreatment. Black young people, in particular, are already overexposed to police violence.

Exposure to police violence can have harmful effects on black and brown children 

Children of color, like the two teens in Tucson, often have traumatizing encounters with police officers from a young age. 

In recent years, a number of media stories have called attention to the ways that black children in particular are exposed to police violence, whether they are directly confronted by police, live in communities where police violence has occurred, or witness excessive force from law enforcement. 

And research has shown that adults often see both black boys and girls as older, more deserving of suspicion, and less innocent than white children. This suggests that when it comes to policing incidents where black children are present, authority figures may not see these children as bystanders needing protection. In some cases, black children may instead be seen as suspects themselves, and are denied the presumption of innocence given to other children.

Witnessing police violence also affects their ability to trust officers and very likely shifts how they perceive themselves in many cases. 

In April, a Florida sheriff’s deputy was been placed on restricted duty after a video showing him slamming a black teenager’s head into the ground and punching him went viral, fueling calls for the officer to be fired. Deputy Christopher Krickovich and another officer had approached a large group of high school students in a shopping center in Tamarac, and one of the boys was arrested for trespassing, according to a report submitted by the officers. Video footage taken by students at the scene shows the boy in handcuffs and a nearby officer push another boy back. As the boy moves, he is pepper-sprayed in the face. When the teen begins to walk away, the officer pulls him to the ground.

This kind of police aggression is all too similar to the deputy’s response in Tucson. Viral videos like these have done a lot to raise public awareness of the violence that black boys and men deal with on a regular basis. It’s just not enough to stop it from happening again.

A libertarian group is suing California for alleged discrimination — against men.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a new state law that requires California companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019. The largest California companies will need a total of three female directors by 2022.

In September, California became the first US state to mandate board room gender diversity. About a quarter of the state’s companies don’t have any female directors, and the rest have very few. The law is part of a growing movement to get more women into lucrative positions that have long been held by men.

But attorneys for the legal group argue that the so-called “woman quota” is unlawful and that it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, according to the lawsuit filed in Sacramento federal court. Their plaintiff, Creighton Meland, is a retired Chicago attorney who owns stock in a California-based company that has no women in its boardroom.

Meland believes that the new rules will force shareholders to “discriminate on the basis of sex” when they vote for potential board members. In other words, Meland seems worried that the law discriminates against men. But his attorneys also insist that the rule is bad for women.

“This law is built on the condescending belief that women aren’t capable of getting into the boardroom unless the government opens the door for them,” said his attorney, Anastasia Boden, in a statement Wednesday.

The legal challenge is the latest “reverse discrimination” claim related to policies and legislation that aim to level the playing field for historically underrepresented groups. It’s particularly interesting that the Pacific Legal Foundation considers the law discriminatory and “condescending” when it was intended to counteract the pervasive gender bias that has long kept women out of corner offices and boardrooms. It also overlooks a company’s best financial interests: Research shows that having more women on corporate boards is good for a company’s bottom line.

The US could do better

The United States lags other developed countries when it comes to gender diversity in the boardroom. In 18 countries, including Austria, Poland, and South Africa, all large companies have at least one female director. The United States has not yet made that list. In fact, the global research firm Egon Zehnder said progress for women has slowed in the US since 2012.

Silicon Valley, in particular, has been long criticized for its lack of representation. Last year, the majority of tech startups (63 percent) had no female board members. But among publicly traded companies in the state, the tech industry is not even the worst offender. Health care and biotech companies in California are the least likely to hire women to serve on boards.

Only 12.8 percent of the board seats at these companies are held by women. And about one-third (33.9 percent) have no women at all. In fact, California companies have fewer female directors than the nationwide average.

That’s not a great look for the state. California has one of the largest economies in the world, so any progress that happens there has global impact. Without a mandate, California companies likely wouldn’t change a thing.

The new law, SB-826, explained

By the end of this year, every publicly traded company based in California is supposed to have at least one woman on its board of directors. By 2022, that number will increase depending on a company’s size. For example, a corporation with five directors must have a minimum of two female directors and a company with six or more directors must have at least three female directors.

That means Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would need to give another board seat to a woman within the next two years. Right now, the company has 10 seats and only two female directors. Any company that doesn’t meet the quota would be fined $100,000 for the first violation and $300,000 for any following violations.

The seeds for the law were planted in 2013 when the state Senate passed a resolution that set a target for companies. The plan was that, by 2017, each public company in California would have at least one woman on its board, and up to three, depending on the size. 

California was the first state in the US to adopt this type of resolution, and five other states have since passed similar measures. The problem is that it didn’t work because it wasn’t legally binding. By 2017, fewer than 20 percent of the 3,000 largest US companies based in California had met the target.

Lawmakers decided that a mandate was the only way for things to change. It’s not such a wild idea. Several European countries have mandated gender diversity on corporate boards. In 2003, Norway was the first to require that 40 percent of board seats be held by women, followed by France and Belgium. In 2015, Germany mandated that 30 percent of corporate board seats be held by women.

The lawsuit is about a problem that doesn’t exist

The new California law seems like a reasonable policy. But the Pacific Legal Foundation thinks it’s an egregious abuse of individual rights. More specifically, the group argues that it’s infringing on the rights of men.

The plaintiff, Meland, is a shareholder in OSI, a medical and security device manufacturer based in Hawthorne, California. Men hold each of the company’s seven board seats, but the company will need to give three of those seats to women by 2022.

“The Woman Quota imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination,” Meland’s attorney claims, according to the court filing.

In other words, Meland is arguing that the law discriminates against men and infringes on his rights as a shareholder to vote for whomever he wants on the board. What he fails to note is that gender bias is what has kept so many women off of US boards.

That’s because directors usually recommend CEOs and other corporate executives to serve on their boards. “Relying on current directors’ recommendations will generally produce candidates much like those directors,” say Deloitte researchers in the company’s 2017 board diversity survey.

The low percentage of women candidates (16 percent) is striking, as is that of racial minorities (19 percent). However, that may be a logical outcome of a process favoring selecting candidates with board experience — who historically have tended to be white and male.

Women hold less than a third of executive positions in corporate America. White men hold 63 percent. Research shows that men have more opportunities to network, and that is often more important to career advancement than performance. Gender stereotypes, like the idea that women are not primary breadwinners, still hold back women from climbing the corporate ladder.

But here’s the thing: research also shows that companies with more female directors perform better.

Diversity in the board room pays off

Studies have shown that companies with higher levels of gender diversity have stronger financial performance and a more engaged workforce.

In particular, a growing body of research shows that having three women on a corporate board represents a “tipping point” in impacting a firm’s financial performance, according to a 2016 study by the research firm MSCI ERG.

The firm analyzed financing results for US companies over a five-year period, from 2011 to 2016. Those that started with at least three women on the board saw gains in equity returns of about 10 percentage points and a 37 percent increase in earnings per share. In contrast, companies that began the period with no female directors experienced negative results (-1 percent and -8 percent, respectively).

Credit Suisse conducted a six-year global research study from 2006 to 2012 with more than 2,000 companies worldwide, showing that having women in the board room is correlated with higher performance. For companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion, stocks for companies with female directors outperformed those with all-male boards by 26 percent.

Requiring companies to diversify their board rooms seems hardly controversial. Yet in 2019, some men still think that women’s advancement is a direct threat.

The CEO of McDonald’s was booted from the company Friday after the board of directors discovered that he had a consensual romantic relationship with an employee.

Stephen Easterbrook, who has been the top executive at McDonald’s since 2015, stepped down for his “poor judgment” in violating the company’s code of conduct, according to an SEC filing. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, with few details about the relationship.

Easterbrook’s separation agreement shows that he will get about 6.5 months of severance (his base salary is $1.5 million). As part of the deal, Easterbrook signed a confidentiality agreement and vowed not to work for McDonald’s competitors for two years.

Easterbrook is divorced, and it’s not illegal to have a consensual relationship with a work subordinate. However, the power dynamic is problematic, as a subordinate may feel forced into a relationship to keep his or her job. Corporate executives have long gotten away with this behavior, but that’s starting to change. Easterbrook’s firing shows how strict companies have become about workplace dating as stories of rampant sexual harassment have rocked corporate America.

And yet the move seems like an empty gesture in light of the serious allegations of sexual harassment that McDonald’s restaurant employees have reported over the years.

“[T]he company has refused to listen to us. With the firing of Steve Easterbrook, we now know why. It’s clear McDonald’s culture is rotten from top to bottom. McDonald’s needs to sit down with worker-survivors and put them at the center of any solution,” the Fight for $15 and a Union movement, which is organizing McDonald’s workers across the country, said in a statement Sunday.

Dozens of women have filed gender discrimination complaints against the company since 2016, arguing that McDonald’s has allowed a toxic work culture to flourish at its independently owned franchises. McDonald’s has since rolled out a sexual harassment prevention training for franchise owners, but restaurant workers say it has done nothing to keep them safe. Easterbrook’s firing is a reminder that the company has done very little to protect its most vulnerable workers.

Women want McDonald’s to take sexual harassment seriously

Long before the #MeToo movement became a force to contend with, women who work at McDonald’s have been complaining about widespread sexual harassment at the iconic fast food chain.

Women say they are fed up with supervisors who grope them, ask for sex, and expose themselves on the job. When they report the behavior, managers ignore them, they say, or even punish them. In 2015, women who work at McDonald’s went on strike in Chicago to express their frustration. In September 2018, they went on strike again, this time in 10 cities.

Female McDonald’s employees have filed more than 50 sexual harassment lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the past three years, according to the Fight for $15 labor movement, which was launched by the Service Employees International Union in 2012. Some of the cases are still under investigation by the EEOC, which is part of the process before workers can sue. The company is currently trying to settle some of the lawsuits that have made it to court. Meanwhile, not much has changed for women who work at the chain. 

In May, a group of 25 women in 20 cities filed sexual harassment complaints against McDonald’s with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most are new cases that must first go through an EEOC investigation, but a handful involve complaints women filed with the agency last year, which they are now taking to court. In the latest round of complaints, which are included in the tally of more than 50 cases mentioned above, workers as young as 16 have accused supervisors of serious misconduct, including attempted rape, indecent exposure, groping, and sexual offers. The women said they were ignored, mocked, or punished when they reported it. Some had their hours cut back and others were fired.

“Sexual harassment is not something you should have to endure no matter how desperately you need a job,” Maribel Hoyos, who quit her job at a McDonald’s restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, told reporters that in May. Hoyos said she and her teenage daughter, who both worked at the same restaurant, were punished for complaining about a manager who repeatedly groped them and made unwanted sexual advances. “I was passed over for a promotion, my work hours were cut and I was cut out of managers’ training program. Then we fell behind on our rent.” 

Before the September 2018 strike, a spokesperson for McDonald’s told the AP that the company had several policies and training programs in place to help franchises prevent harassment, and that they’ve hired experts to help “evolve” those procedures. 

In May, in response to the most recent complaints, Easterbrook said that the company recently began offering sexual harassment prevention training to franchise owners and general managers, and that about 90 percent of them have gone through it. He also said the company launched an anonymous hotline to report complaints. It’s unclear what happens after the complaints are filed.

The company, based in Chicago, had been slow to get involved because it doesn’t consider franchise workers company employees. There are more than 38,000 McDonald’s restaurants around the country, but the vast majority (93 percent) are owned by independent franchises companies.

McDonald’s is locked in a labor dispute over whether the fast-food chain is considered a “joint employer,” and is therefore partly liable for labor violations committed by individual franchises. The company argues that it is not a joint employer, so it cannot be held legally accountable for sexual harassment and other illegal workplace behavior at any of its independently owned restaurants. Workers disagree. They say the company has too much control over franchise restaurants and workers to make that claim.

Sexual harassment has been a problem at McDonald’s for decades

America’s most famous burger chain has a history of discrimination investigations that dates back even further than the strikes.

In 2008, a Colorado-based McDonald’s franchise agreed to pay $505,000 to a group of female employees as part of a settlement with the EEOC. In the original lawsuit, attorneys for the EEOC said teenage girls who worked at a restaurant in Denver were subjected to “egregious sexual harassment in the workplace by their male supervisor.” The supervisor allegedly bit their breasts and grabbed their buttocks, and offered favors in exchange for sex.

Then, in 2011, the agency sued the owner of a Wisconsin McDonald’s, claiming that the male employees made sexual comments about the bodies of their female co-workers, propositioned them, kissed them, and groped them without consent. Several of the victims were teenage girls in high school. 

“Despite being notified of the situation, [the owner] failed and refused to take prompt and appropriate action to correct the harassment and the resulting hostile environment, forcing at least one of the harassed employees to quit. Further, the company fired other harassed employees after they complained repeatedly about their co-workers’ behavior,” the EEOC said in a press release at the time. The restaurant owners settled the case for $1 million.

These are just a few of the cases that the EEOC agreed to take to court. But most women employees have to pursue cases on their own, which places a huge burden on low-wage workers in the fast-food industry, many of whom are young and may not be aware of their legal rights.

While it’s a good, public-facing step to fire Easterbrook over a consensual relationship, it’s going take a lot more to convince workers that something has fundamentally changed.