On Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m, the ACLU of Southern California will host its Women’s Rights Forum at the Hollywood United Methodist Church. The forum will feature a diverse panel of issue experts working to solve gender inequality. Speakerswill include Patty Bellasalma, president of California NOW; Laphonza Butler, president of SEIU ULTCW; and Sandra Fluke, attorney and advocate. The panel will be moderated by Thalia Gonzalez, professor of politics at Occidental College.

In a three-part series, we will publish short, one-on-one interviews with each speaker. Below is "Nowhere near enough: Part 2 of the State of Women's Rights" with Laphonza Butler, president of the Service Employees International Union United Long Term Care Workers (SEIU ULTCW), interviewed by Elizabeth Urena, media relations assistant at ACLU SoCal. 
ACLU of Southern California: What inspired you to go into community organizing and ultimately, labor unions?
Laphonza Butler: I watched my mother take up every job that she could to make sure that my two brothers and I had an opportunity to pursue our dreams. To know that up until her 60^th birthday, she had never had health insurance, to know that she worked minimum wage jobs with little to no training and to see how she was treated in those jobs inspired me. So when I graduated college, I found SEIU—or SEIU found me—and it has really been an adventure in seeking justice ever since. So, I would say the person that inspires me is my mother.
ACLU SoCal: How did SEIU find you?
LB: In 1998, SEIU started to recruit organizers from historically black colleges. My frame of reference for social justice, as I grew up in the Deep South, had always been the Civil Rights movement. I was a sophomore at Jackson State when one of the recruiters visited our political science class, that was my first exposure to the labor movement, and that’s how they found me.
ACLU SoCal: Wage discrimination hurts everyone, but particularly working moms and women of color. California just raised its minimum wage to nine dollars an hour. Do you think that’s enough?
LB: No, it’s not enough. My own mother was one of those working moms, and I know a lot of the members of my union are moms and women of color working multiple jobs to make ends meet. The cost of living is increasing, and wages are continuing to be stagnant.
I don’t even think the president’s “10.10” is enough. There needs to be a bold proposal for a wage that lifts families out of poverty. We’re seeing the fast food workers fight for $15. Let’s try to figure out where wages would be if we had set a minimum wage with inflation back when we first passed the minimum wage. But somewhere there has got to be a bold statement.
Look at what’s happening in Seattle, the city of SeaTac, where a ballot initiative passed for a $15 an hour minimum wage for SeaTac. Now, Seattle’s newly elected mayor has a wage commission planning a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage. You see a lot of things happening around the country and we’ve got to figure out how to get that momentum to our state.
We live in a country where politics rule the day, and everything is the art of negotiation. I wish the Left would start a little higher and actually work with business, with the Republicans and with all of the fabric that makes America to figure out a living wage. I’m inspired by the $15 an hour movement found in cities across the country, but I think we all know in California that $9 an hour is nowhere near enough.
ACLU SoCal: What do you consider to be the biggest obstacle to achieving racial and gender equality in the workplace? 
LB: I think a lack of courage is an obstacle. When we find the courage, as a nation, to demand better is when we will start to perform better. The heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement had the courage to demand a different conversation in our country. I think it is up to this generation to find the courage to pick up that that mantle and continue to demand. It’s only when we go silent when discrimination is allowed.
ACLU SoCal: How do you think we can make the women’s movement more connected to women of color?
LB: We have to be conscious of those voices and those experiences, and frankly it starts withwomen of color; they need to raise their voices. So often, white women with some degree of privilege start the conversation. Look at Maria Shriver and how she is talking about women across the country, online and in movies, and I think it’s great. But women of color need to raise their voices as well. We’ve got to be intentional about including the voices and stories of women of color working within the movement as a whole.

On Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m, the ACLU of Southern California will host its Women’s Rights Forum at the Hollywood United Methodist Church. The forum will feature a diverse panel of issue experts working to solve gender inequality. Speakers will include Patty Bellasalma, president of California NOW; Laphonza Butler, president of SEIU ULTCW; and Sandra Fluke, attorney and advocate. The panel will be moderated by Thalia Gonzalez, professor of politics at Occidental College.

In a three-part series, we will publish short, one-on-one interviews with each speaker. Below is "Hope and Pause: Part 1 of the State of Women's Rights" with Patty Bellasalma, president of the National Organization for Women California (California NOW), interviewed by Cathren Cohen, media relations intern at ACLU SoCal.
ACLU of Southern California: You have been an advocate for women’s rights for three decades. Have we made enough progress?
Patty Bellasalma: My answer is no. Actually, not even close to enough progress. We still live in a nation and a world, where dominance and oppression by individuals and by a whole matrix of social statuses is the rule rather than the exception. Until that is fundamentally changed, our work is not done. And even then, it won't be done, because our work will change to maintain it.
Right now, we are seeing an unraveling at the state level of progress that was hard-fought over the last 30 or 40 years. Unfortunately, for all of us that tirelessly work, it is a never-ending process, which gives you hope on one side and pause on the other.
ACLU SoCal: What specific rights are being unraveled, or which do you think are the most pressing, particularly in California?
PB: We have a perception of ourselves as a progressive state, but in reality, we’re a state that’s deeply affected by Citizens United, in combination with state financing ethics laws that are the weakest in the country. We’re seeing healthcare corporations coming to Sacramento that basically have an iron grip. So we’re working in partnership with the California Nurse’s Association on several bills that are going to encompass a Patient Bill of Rights. One of the things that it will guarantee is the right to go outside of healthcare networks for reproductive care because we’re on the verge of having Catholic healthcare conglomerates that will rival, if not surpass, Kaiser, and the implications of that are horrifying for women and girls and anyone who believes that they have the right to decide what kind of care they should receive rather than the Catholic bishops.
Another piece of legislation that we’re working on with Susan Bonilla is Assembly Bill 2512, which adds gender equity to the academic performance index and the local control accountability plan, because gender equity was left out of the Prop 30 reforms. We’re also on the coalition Raising California Together, which is fighting for universal early education and childcare and the California Nurses lead Coalition for Healthy California, which is a healthcare for all coalition. And then lastly, we’ve been fighting for the last two sessions on ensuring that all pregnant women have access to the healthcare they need whether they’re under Medi-Cal or the exchange. And we’ve been fighting the Brown administration for the last two sessions to make that happen.
ACLU SoCal: You have written a lot about the intersectionality of different issues with women’s rights. Some of the issues you have discussed so far automatically stick out to people as women’s rights issues while for other issues, people don’t necessarily think about their implications for women. What are some of the most interesting intersections that you have come across in your work?
PB: Intersectionality is a way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. For us, it's always answering the question, “Who benefits?” and for gender equity it’s “What’s the gender impact?”. With that said, every issue is seen from an intersectional framework, especially since gender has historically and continues to be used for domination and status categories. It is the institutionalizing of gender equity, using an intersection framework that is the center of our work. It is hard to say what [issue] is the outlier, because we don’t see it that way. I think the most controversial thing we have been addressing is gender roles and gender norms that underlie state policy and distributions of wealth. That seems to be the most uncomfortable for the people who live and work in the Sacramento area, not so much for our coalition partners, but whether its philanthropy or government, the idea of dealing with patriarchal definitions of masculinity and femininity is a very controversial and difficult subject.
There’s this wonderful quote that I found written by some tremendous scholars associated with the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in Oakland, and it describes the process of creating this new type of coalition building. And I think the ACLU has been at the forefront of this. The quote is: “Progressive politics do not flow magically from identities. On the contrary, it is important for progressive politics that people derive their identities from their politics rather than their politics from their identities. An activist recognizes the need to give progressive new meanings based on political principles to embody social identities.”
It’s a little complicated but it really digs down into that. For example, men of color need to reject gender and class privilege, white women need to reject race and class privilege and women of color need to reject class privilege. We all have to fully embrace the breadth of our statuses and realize that our unity lies in eliminating everyplace where any of us get denied our humanity by someone else based on some perceived class group.
ACLU SoCal: In what future direction do you hope to see California NOW go?
PB: I actually think that the most compelling and mind-blowing work is in the consciousness raising around discussing women—fully valuing women and the work that we do. One of the ways in which we do this is adopted from Riane Eisler’s work in Caring Economy. She asks the question, “Why do we pay a plumber $100 an hour and our child care worker $10 an hour? And even deeper why do we pay the plumber who fixes our toilet more than the person who cares and develops our children?” And the answer to that reveals who and what we value. And when you internalize that, and say, "Well, I’m going to work to change that," and you start to deal with the numbers, that right now in the state of California 47 billion dollars a year is handed over to the economy in unpaid labor by women—47 billion dollars. And that’s not even counting the paid work at $10 an hour.
So when you’re talking about fully valuing skilled care work, because that’s what it is—changing the language and fully valuing what women do—it’s tectonic; it would basically eradicate poverty. It would bring men into the realm of being responsible and take their full share of both the economic as well as the actual social and physical work of child development. Everything is founded upon that—particularly, the social dominance model of the male-female relationship. Working to raise the consciousness of women to put a number—a value on that work and then actively work to see that value recognized, first, and then to actually work to see that that money gets redistributed back to the women and men who provide that care, is the work of a lifetime, frankly.
The only other thing is the importance in addressing the idea of personal responsibility. You hear that word a lot, but hardly ever attached to the people in decision-making roles about choosing to maintain the social dominant sex and gender relations, or to continue the school-to-prison pipeline, simply because it was the easy thing to do, supporting leadership rather than representing the people who put you there. It’s the nature of what California NOW does in its essence because we’re independently funded by the women and the state is calling people out for the decisions that they make, whether they’re in government or in philanthropy or in corporations.
Patty Bellasalma is president of the National Organization for Women California. You can follow her work @CaliforniaNOW, and meet her and other women advocates in person on Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m. at the ACLU SoCal Women's Rights Forum at the Hollywood United Methodist Church. Register for this free event. 

Imagine bringing a date home for dinner. You put the laptop away and mute your phone. You prepare a gourmet home-cooked meal for two, queue up a selection of romantic songs and pick out a movie to watch after dinner. As the evening winds down, your heart races a bit as you go in for a kiss and wonder how your night will end.
Now, imagine that someone is monitoring each and every event of your evening. Oh, don’t worry, they’re not actually watching you or listening in on your conversation. They just know who you emailed or called just before you put your computer away. They know what you bought for dinner and how you prepared it. They know who came over, where he or she came from and how long he or she stayed. They know what time you started the movie and which songs you listened to. They even know what time you turned off the lights — and whether or not the music was still playing when you did.
And they know all of this without ever getting a search warrant.
Unfortunately, this scenario is all too real. Government agencies from the NSA to local law enforcement have taken advantage of weak protections for “metadata” — including records about your phone calls, emails, purchases, location and more — to build huge databases about ordinary Americans. In thousands of cases, this information has been inappropriately accessed, potentially exposing a vast array of information about individuals: their attendance at a gay rights rally or addiction support group, their purchase of a home pregnancy test or a dating service subscription, or their calls to a suicide hotline or a job recruiter.

In response, the ACLU of California released Metadata: Piecing Together a Privacy Solution, a new policy paper that offers a way forward. It explains why lawmakers might have originally decided to give metadata less protection than content — and why the reasons for doing so are no longer valid in the modern world. It highlights the sensitive information that metadata can expose and provides evidence of actual abuses that have occurred in past years. Drawing from recent court cases, state laws, and analysis, it provides a simple roadmap for courts and lawmakers looking to enhance protections for metadata and ensure that our right to privacy remains alive and well in the modern era. Among other things, it is clear that we must:

• Protect all sensitive information, whether it is “content” or “metadata”
• Protect sensitive information held by third parties
• Protect sensitive information derived by aggregating and analyzing other data
• Provide law enforcement and other government agencies with clear rules and guidance
• Ensure that any collection or use of metadata is transparent and subject to independent oversight

The distinction between content (which receives stronger protection) and metadata might have made sense decades ago when technology to collect and analyze data was virtually nonexistent. But in the modern world, non-content does not mean non-sensitive. Indeed, the explosion of data mining, targeted advertising and other new technologies is driven by the realization that companies and the government can learn a great deal about an individual simply be recording their actions. We hope this paper will help make sure that all sensitive information receives the protection it deserves.
Chris Conley is the Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow with the ACLU of Northern California. Follow Chris on Twitter.