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

The enactment of any equal pay legislation will add hundreds of employees to an already inflated Federal payroll and hundreds of thousands of dollars to an already astronomical Federal budget.

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W. Boyd Owen, Vice-president of personnel administration for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, Testimony, Senate Hearing.
04/03/1963 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

Not only does there seem to be no necessity for this kind of Federal legislation, but these specific bills go far beyond the alleged purpose of advancing the cause of equal pay for equal work. They involve undue interference in the work relationship in a manner which would cause serious and numerous operating difficulties, interfere with efficient management, and prove disruptive to good relations between employers and employees.

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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

[W]e feel that in a free competitive economy, the task of equal pay to women workers is properly within the province of collective bargaining and not of police action by the government.

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George Meaney, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
06/06/1953 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

By contrast, the dissent’s argument that a discrimination plaintiff can sue based on each paycheck she receives, if her current paycheck was somehow affected by discrimination in the distant past, would allow plaintiffs to sue based on discrimination that occurred decades before, even if the employer is innocent, the alleged discriminators have all died, and the employer no longer has access to any evidence that could vindicate it…That is fundamentally unfair, and at odds with the whole purpose of having a statute of limitations.

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The Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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.