Employment Discrimination

Employment Discrimination

Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age. A growing body of law also seeks to prevent employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Discriminatory practices include bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, compensation, retaliation, and various types of harassment.

Cry Wolf Quotes

Any figures advanced to sustain a case that extensive rate discrimination exists, are likely to be misleading because they cannot represent the full extent to which the principle of equal pay for equal work exists throughout industry. While contract provisions might show the degree to which equal pay is embodied in collective bargaining agreements, they fail to indicate the far greater number of cases where employers of their own volition paid the same rates to men and women where jobs were equal, or where an identical wage scale is applicable to men and women although no specific ‘equal wage’ provision is contained in the agreement.

-
Statement of the National Association of Manufacturers at the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Subcommittee on Labor). Aug 1, 1962.
08/01/1962 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

As a small-business owner, you are most likely too busy to be able to take the time to carefully review the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007, a complicated, vague bill that will have harmful effects on small business. As you'll soon learn, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 is anything but fair to small business. Tell your senator to vote ‘NO’ on this erroneous piece of legislation.

-
From an NFIB letter to their members.

[The proposal would] involve undue interference in the work relationship…interfere with efficient management, and prove disruptive to good relations between employer and employees.

-
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) representative Leo Teplow, Testimony, House Committee on Education and Labor.
05/18/1950 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

This bill would allow an employee to bring a claim against an employer decades after the alleged initial act of discrimination occurred. Trial lawyers, you can be sure, are salivating at this very prospect.

-
Representative Howard P. McKeon (R-CA), the senior Republican House Committee on Education and Labor, The New York Times.

Evidence

Resources

University of California-Berkeley Labor Center carries out research on labor and workplace-related issues.

National Committee on Pay Equity is a coalition working to eliminate sex- and race-based wage discrimination and to achieve pay equity.

National Women’s Law Center

is a prominent think tank and legal advocacy organization.

Institute for Women’s Policy Research is a prominent think tank that is largely focused on American women's issues. This covers everything from pay equity to welfare reform to domestic violence.