I’ve followed Sins Invalid for a few years now, and always lamented that I haven’t been in Bay Area during their yearly performance. They are:
Sins Invalid is a San Francisco/Bay Area based performance project that celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. Since 2006, our performances have explored themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body, impacting thousands through live performance.
Now Sins is working to turn their show into a documentary, so that people far and wide can experience their work.
I’m excited.
Like many groups, they are turning to kickstarter to get some funding going. Check out their page and see if you want to support. A donation of $35 or more comes with a downloadable copy of the film. Sweet.
Class-action discrimination lawsuits after Wal-Mart
Originally posted in Community Blog
By Amanda Dysart & Ariela Migdal, ACLU Women’s Rights Project
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit hears oral argument in Davis v. Cintas, one of the first nationwide class action discrimination cases to be argued since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes last June. The court will decide whether women around the country who applied to be sales representatives at Cintas — a company that rents uniforms and supplies to businesses — can bring a class action to challenge what they claim are Cintas’s discriminatory hiring practices.
The women point to the fact that more than 90 percent of the sales representatives hired during the years in question were men, as were more than 90 percent of the hiring managers. They also argue that managers at Cintas based their hiring on stereotypes — like evidence that the CEO acknowledged a “myth” at the company that women could not be sales representatives, and statements by managers that women could not handle the job and their husbands would not like them working mostly with men. But the trial court found that the women who were rejected for the position did not have enough in common to proceed as a class.
The stakes are high — not only for the thousands of women in the class, but for all workers who need to band together to use class actions to challenge discriminatory workplace practices. Under the rules governing class actions, a group of people challenging discrimination can be certified as a class if they have questions of law or fact in common. Class actions allow people whose individual cases might not be worth much to band together to challenge broad, systemic discriminatory practices. Class actions are especially important for challenging workplace discrimination, like the hiring discrimination in Cintas, because workers often point to a pattern of discriminatory decision making that might go undetected, or be hard to prove, in the context of an individual decision not to hire someone. Read More »