Single lesbian mom Julia Heath doesn't want any parent to have to go through an ordeal like hers.
When her HIV-positive daughter got sick earlier this year, Heath did what any mother would do—she took time off from work to care for her.
That time off, Heath said, is costing her her job.
Heath, 38, has filed complaints with the state Human Rights Commission and most recently with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She is prepared, she said, to fight as long as she needs to.
"I'm going to hang onto this—I'm not backing down."
She is currently on suspension without pay from the state Department of Health Services, where she has been a casework specialist for two years.
The suspension purportedly stems from an Aug. 28 argument with her supervisor that Heath said her bosses blew out of proportion as a way to get rid of her.
Heath's supervisors could not be reached for comment for this story.
Tensions with her boss began to grow, she said, when she took time off to care for her 11-year-old adoptive daughter, Carrie, in January.
Carrie, a precocious honor-roll student at Galileo Scholastic Academy of Math and Science, had stopped taking one of her HIV medications, unbeknownst to Heath.
"She told the truth at least, so her doctors were able to get on top of it because her viral load went from non-detectable to 10,000," Heath said. "Now, every time she takes that one medicine, I say, 'Do it in front of me no matter where I am.' It's really nasty stuff."
After exhausting all of her off days by the end of January, Heath started getting complaints from her supervisors that she wasn't finishing her work, forcing them to dole it out among her co-workers.
Heath maintains that she wasn't given reasonable accommodations to complete her work, in violation of the Family Medical Leave Act. The act also calls for employers to accommodate an employee's absence by redistributing their work if need be in a way that doesn't cause conflict with their colleagues.
In April, Heath took more time off when Carrie became overheated and fainted at a restaurant. She was fine, Heath said, but her doctors "had her see every specialist at the U of Chicago hospitals" over the course of a week.
Heath's mother also became ill around the same time, but when she tried to take time off again, her employers told her she'd have to take the three months provided in the Family Medical Leave Act all at one time, something she soon learned was untrue.
"They were building a paper trail," Heath said, and gave her documents stating that she had abused her time off and wasn't keeping up with her work.
A week after being written up, on July 10, Heath went to the federal government's labor relations officials, who invoked her right to intermittent time off under the Act. She also filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission asserting her rights as the mother of an HIV-positive child. She has since filed with the EEOC, whose officials told her that her claim with the Human Rights Commission wasn't being handled in a timely manner, something that Heath feels is telling given that she works for the state. Her complaint with the EEOC is still pending.
Things came to a head on Aug. 28, when her supervisor returned from a weeklong vacation and the two began to argue. According to her three bosses, the situation was a volatile one that Heath had to be physically removed from. They claim that she was threatening and used profanity.
According to Heath and up to 30 of her co-workers, however, the argument never became threatening or profane. They were yelling, yes, Heath said, but that was all. Her co-workers have since signed documents verifying what they saw and heard and handed them over to the union.
Heath said her supervisors have seized upon the incident as an excuse to get her out of the office, something they achieved two days later when she was placed on administrative leave with pay. That turned into suspension without pay about a month later for an unspecified amount of time.
"This whole thing started because of Family Medical Leave Act, which if they had enacted it when I needed it, it would have never gotten to this point. Never," Heath said.
Heath said it is important to her to have her story told to perhaps spare other parents what she is going through.
"I felt that this story would help a lot of people— ( I'm a ) Black, woman, lesbian, mom, single parent," she said. "It covers a lot of different areas and I want to help ( people ) . I feel like I've already won, it's a win-win situation for me in that I'm able to talk about this and I'm able to share this information with people. And that's always important to me. Just to inform people and to tell them their rights."
"I watched the Democratic convention, and I felt like Hillary was speaking to me. She said, 'Family first.' Everybody's family first. I'm included in that—I have a family. I'm a different kind of family, but this is my family. And I have to meet my responsibilities like everybody else."
Heath said she is keeping her options open and intends to find other work, hopefully with the state in a different location. Before the incident, she had filed for a transfer to an office closer to Carrie's school, a request that she has not yet gotten a response to.
She is also a graduate student at large at the University of Chicago and eventually wants to get a master's degree in social work.
Heath moved to Chicago four years ago from Washington, D.C., where she worked for a facility that housed children. It was at that facility that she met Carrie, then two years old.
"Carrie's the best thing that's ever happened to me," she said. "I'm a real advocate for her."
