As Pride Month is recognized around the world this year, the rainbow-hued celebration will be colored by hope, fear for the future, and reverence for the queer liberation movement’s radical past.

This year has already seen the murders of at least nine Black trans women in a slow-moving genocide that continues to ravage the community. The Trump administration is still forcing its agenda to deny basic human rights to queer people, especially those who are trans and non-binary. Around the world, queer people face brutal repression and inequality. Through it all, the community has stood strong, and even when faced with constant attacks by a homophobic, transphobic right-wing government, LGBTQIA people in the U.S. do have a formidable ally: labor unions.

American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President Richard Trumka noted in a 2018 op-ed, “For many LGBTQ Americans, a union card is their only form of employment protection,” and he’s right. There is currently no federal law that protects queer and trans workers from being discriminated against at work, and the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era policy that classified bias against trans workers as a form of sex discrimination, which falls under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With even that gone, queer and trans workers are left with no federal-level workplace protections, and are subject to individual states’ laws, which can also impact access to housing and health care.

This is far from an ideal scenario, which something that is made clear by recent legal battles in states like North Carolina and Georgia — as well as by Vice President Mike Pence’s record of anti-LGBTQ policies and his anti-union stance.

In 28 U.S. states, queer and trans workers can still be fired due to their sexual orientation and gender identity, and a strong union contract is often the only legally binding workplace protection available to LGBTQIA workers to fight employment discrimination. This is especially important because of the high unemployment rates for transgender and non-binary people — 16% overall — which can be compounded by other factors like racial discrimination, age discrimination, or national origin discrimination.

“As more and more people come out, especially as trans and nonbinary, our rights in the workplace and the discrimination we face grows all the more prevalent,” Noor Al-Sibai, a queer journalist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Freelance Journalists Union, tells Teen Vogue.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), more than one in four trans workers have lost a job due to bias, with over three-fourths reporting that they’ve experienced discrimination at work. Discrimination can take many forms, from privacy violations, refusal to hire, harassment, and physical and sexual violence to misgendering workers or denying them access to appropriate bathrooms. According to the NCTE’s 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, 30% of trans workers report experiencing harassment at work, and trans workers experience unemployment at a rate three times higher than those in the general population do; for trans workers of color, the unemployment rate is four times higher.

As a veteran labor organizer and the current director of Contract Campaigns for the Writers Guild of America, East (the union to which I belong and am a councilmember), Arsenia Reilly-Collins has seen firsthand the ways a union contract can strengthen protections for queer workers.