It is important to note that despite the generally poor record of effective implementation with respect to state and local anti-discrimination statutes, their very existence has caused some efforts toward compliance. In an effort to explore this point further, our Research Department compared maximum rates of pay for municipal employees in four cities whose employees are covered by state or local anti-discrimination laws and rates in four others where there is no such coverage. The data disclosed that, in cities lacking an anti-discrimination law, wages for refuse collectors-a classification in which minority employees predominate because of discriminatory personnel practices-were depressed far beyond what might be attributable to the low-skill requirement of the job. The structure of employment opportunities available to minority group members in either the public or the private sector, in the absence of equal employment legislation, results in intensified competition for this kind of lowskilled job. Thus, wage rate for these jobs are set, not by the comparative worth of skills through a full classification hierarchy, but by the operation of a restricted labor market, where the supply of workers substantially exceeds the demand for their services. For this study, we examined the differential between the rate for a cityemployed auto mechanic and that for city refuse collector. Inasmuch as all rates are taken from union contracts-not necessarily ours-we would prefer not to disclose the names of the cities to avoid risking injury to the collective bargaining relationship and thereby undermine current efforts to obtain improvements. Instead, the prepared chart uses numerical and alphabetical designations for the locations. We found that auto mechanics were paid pretty much the same in all cities selected for the study except one, whose pay scales for all categories are consistently higher than the other cities. Pay for city refuse collectors, on the other hand, differs widely, but falls into two distinct categories-the $6,700-to-$7,900 group and the $3,700-to-$4,800 group. All cities in the higher-paid group have either state or city statues prohibiting job discrimination. Comparing refuse collector's pay with that for auto mechanics, we find the spread between the two classifications is far greater in cities without a fair employment law than in those which have such a law. In cities with a statute the differential between the two rates ranged between $624 (9 percent) and $1,144 (14 per cent). In cities without a statute the spread between the two jobs ranged between $2,210 (46 percent) and $2,712 (63 percent). In other words, the differential between the pay of an auto mechanic and a garbage collector is upwards of $1,100 greater in cities lacking an anti-discrimination statute. Inasmuch as there is little difference among these cities in pay for auto mechanics, substantially all of that $1,100 is additional differential due to the low pay for refuse collectors in cities without a statute. There are three basic reasons for attributing this large difference in pay spread to the absence of an anti-discrimination law: 1. We know from long experience in negotiating city pay rates in all sections of the country that a differential of the magnitude found here is greater than would be justified solely by the difference in the level of skill required for the two jobs. 2. We know also that, despite the generally poor record of state and local anti-discrimiation commissions in eliminating job bias, their very existence has caused most employers to make at least token efforts at compliance with resultant upward pressure on low-wage jobs. In locations without benefit of such a law, even this movement is lacking-except perhaps among Government contractors of private employers covered by Title VII. 3. Opportunities for upward mobility or higher-paying jobs are so limited in areas untouched by anti-discrimination law, that blacks and Spanishsurnamed workers have no choice but to compete for the lowest paying jobs in the community. They are thus preyed upon as a cheap and plentiful source of labor whereever the absence of opportunity confines them to the lowest categories. If discrimination in public employment is to end, the Congress must enact strong enforcement legislation while extending Title VII coverage to state and local governments. We are firmly convinced that only a law with broad coverage enforced by a Commission with strong powers and a strong staff, will be able to effectively implement the declared equal employment opportunity policy of this nation. The passage of H.R. 1746 will bring many millions of employees within the protection of a strengthened Title VII, and extend the policy of equal employment opportunity to those to whom it now is an empty phrase. We fully support H.R. 1746 and urge its enactment. STATEMENT OF MRS. HELEN P. BAIN, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION The National Education Association, with a membership of 1,100,000 educators in the national association and an additional 1,000,000 in state and local affiliates, supports the enactment of HR 1746. This bill, which amends Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, confers long overdue enforcement powers on the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission by empowering EEOC to issue court enforceable "cease and desist" orders after conciliation efforts fail and after issuance of a complaint and appropriate hearing procedures. We believe the time is now for EEOC to have such authority. Of most interest to our membership is the elimination in HR 1746 of the exemption in existing law which excludes Federal, State, County, and Municipal employees (including teachers) from the jurisdiction of EEOC. Further, the present exemption for teachers in educational institutions would be repealed. Under the existing law, educators in public schools who are the object of discrimination, most usually on the basis of race, sex, or religion, have little recourse to the remedies available to persons in private employment. The most dramatic cases concern minority race educators who have been displaced or demoted by the thousands as a result of desegregation. A more chronic, if less dramatic, complaint could be made, and is increasingly being made, by thousands of women educators who have been denied appointment or advancement in public school administration even though they are better qualified by both training and experience than the male educators who receive the advancement. There are few documented evidences of public school systems which still pursue the practice of paying women teachers less than men for the same work. Last year we discovered three such situations. Data for this year is not yet compiled. The fact is that while women comprise 67.6% of the public elementary and secondary teachers, only four out of 13,000 school district superintendents are women. Of 78,000 schools, 78% of those in elementary schools are men, and 96% of the secondary school principles are men. In 1928, over 55% of the elementary principals were women, At the higher education level, discrimination is even more acute. Women college faculty members receive about $1,000 less average annual salary than their male counterparts. We know of no state university or college with a woman president. There are one or more municipal or private colleges with women presidents, usually members of a religious order, but here, too, the men far outnumber women. We do not believe that enactment of HR 1746 will overnight revolutionize the situation. We do believe, however, that those in the field of education who feel they are discriminated against because of sex should receive the same opportunity to challenge the alleged discrimination as those who are employed in business and industry. Through the DuShane Emergency Fund NEA is currently involved in 54 cases concerning alleged discrimination against black teachers and principals. These cases under the present law must be pursued through the courts-a long and often financially disastrous process. The provisions in HR 1746 grant EEOC cease and desist authority, thus in effect giving the EEOC the power of the courts to order a situation corrected. Administrative proceedings such as EEOC would follow are usually less constrained than Federal District Court proceedings by formal rules of evidence, thus less subject to delay and less burdensome for the parties concerned. + A public employee can, of course, assert his Constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment to bring a suit in court for discrimination in public employment unless the charge is based on sex discrimination which the Supreme Court does not hold as covered under the 14th Amendment. Experience has shown, in any event, that it is unrealistic to expect individuals to bear this burden. Such litigation is expensive and time consuming. And it is not normally undertaken by individuals who may be afraid of the courts, who cannot afford time off from work or who are afraid of losing jobs. Such enforcement is no enforcement at all. We urge therefore that HR 1746 be enacted by the Congress at the earliest possible date. Hon. JOHN DENT, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE OF B'NAI B'RITH, Chairman, General Subcommittee on Labor, DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN: The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith welcomes this opportunity to express its support for and to urge early passage by the Congress of H.R. 1746, the "Equal Employment Opportunities Enforcement Act," designed to strengthen and expand the authority of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Anti-Defamation League is the educational arm of B'nai B'rith which was founded over 125 years ago in 1843 and is America's oldest and largest Jewish service organization. It is dedicated to securing fair treatment and equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, religion, color or national origin. Removal of barriers to equal employment opportunity has long been among the Anti-Defamation League's top priorities and to that end it has consistently supported the enactment of fair employment practices legislation. The main thrust of H.R. 1746, like the bill reported by the Committee on Education and Labor last August, is to give the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission authority to issue judicially enforceable cease and desist orders. Its enactment is essential if the Commission is to have the ability which it now lacks to deal effectively with the problem of job discrimination, for despite the progress made since Congress approved Title VII and the 1964 Civil Rights Act employment discrimination is still a pervasive and persistent phenomenon. The conclusion is inescapable that if we are to achieve the objectives of Title VII the Commission must be given adequate enforcement authority. All the Commission can do under existing law is to investigate and try to conciliate complaints of discrimination. Where persuasion and conciliation prove unsuccessful, the Commssion is powerless to act; the victim is left to his own resources. He must seek relief in the courts on his own, unless the Attorney General finds a "pattern or practice" of discrimination and brings suit to enjoin such discrimination. To date, as the Justice Department testified on March 3 before this Subcommittee, only 59 such "pattern or practice" law suits have been brought and the limited resources of the Department's Civil Rights Division preclude the bringing of such law suits on a volume basis. It is clear that if the Commission is to be in a position to carry out the responsibilities delegated to it by Congress in Title VII and be a truly effective agency it must be given cease and desist authority. In conferring such authority on the Commission, Congress would be doing no more than giving the Commission the same power long enjoyed by other Federal regulatory agencies. The experience of the state agencies shows that such enforcement powers are necessary to make the conciliation process effective. Where enforcement authority exists to back up conciliation, relatively few cases go to an administrative hearing-they are settled or otherwise disposed of-and even fewer are appealed to the courts. The mere existence of cease and desist powers helps to bring about voluntary compliance. As the Education and Labor Committee stated in its report last year: "An important consequence of granting the Commission authority to issue cease and desist orders will be the enhancement of the Commission's ability to obtain successful conciliation. Experience of State Fair Employment Practices Commissions has shown that when cease and desist power is available, achievement of voluntary compliance is much more likely." H. Rept. No. 91-1434, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess., 4(1970) Administration witnesses before this Subcommittee, while acknowledging this deficiency in existing law, would not however give the Commission cease and desist authority. Instead they would require the Commission to go to court against a recalcitrant employer or union. In our view, authority to issue cease and desist orders after an administrative hearing will be more effective in bringing about compliance with the law than will the court enforcement approach. It is only through the administra tive hearing procedure that regulatory agencies are able to handle expeditiously, and dispose of, the multitude of cases coming before them. The administrative agency is better suited and better geared than the courts for carrying out the public policy and enforcing the public rights which Congress has enacted into law. As the late Justice Frankfurter has stated: "Unlike courts, which are concerned primarily with the enforcement of private rights although public interests may thereby be implicated, administrative agencies are predominantly concerned with enforcing public rights although private interests may thereby be affected. To no small degree administrative agencies for the enforcement of public rights were established by Congress because more flexible and less traditional procedures were called for than those evolved by the courts. It is therefore essential to the vitality of the administrative process that the procedural powers given to these administrative agencies not be confined within the conventional modes by which business is done in courts." Dissenting opinion, Federal Communications Commission v. National Broadcasting Co., Inc., 319 U.S. 239, 248 (1943) To deny the EEOC cease and desist powers and to require it to go the court route would severly restrict the Commission's effectiveness. As Professor Joseph P. Witherspoon of the University of Texas School of Law in a recently published comprehensive treatise on the work of human rights commissions, “Administrative Implementation of Civil Rights" (1968) states: (pp. 139–140) ". . . The sine qua non to dealing effectively with individual instances of discrimination is the existence of some form of civil-rights law prohibiting discrimination against minority and other disadvantaged groups and the availability of a human-relations commission with ample authority to enforce that law administratively against officials and private persons and institutions who violate it. . . "If the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . . . [is] to become at all effective in disposing of individual instances of discrimination, [it] must be given . . . the power to compel individual violators to obey the law through cease and desist orders enforceable in the courts. For these reasons we believe that the cease and desist authority embodied in H.R. 1746 is plainly to be preferred to the court enforcement approach. In addition to giving the Commission much needed cease and desist authority, H.R. 1746 would also make a number of other desirable improvements in the existing law. The jurisdiction of the Commission would be extended to cover employers and unions with eight or more employees or members, respectively, as against the present floor of 25. State and local government employees now excluded from the law's coverage would be brought within the law's protection. And the Commission would be given the responsibility now lodged in the Civil Service Commission for assuring equal employment opportunity for Federal employees. In addition to bringing these several classes of employees under the Commission's protective umbrella, the bill would also transfer to the Commission both the contract compliance functions of the Office of Federal Contract Compilance and the Attorney General's authority to bring "pattern or practice" lawsuits. These provisions would not only extend the protection of the law to millions of employees now denied its benefits but would also make possible the development of a uniform national policy of non-discrimination in employment by centralizing responsibility for all equal employment opportunity activities in a single agency. We respectfully request that this statement be included in the printed record of the hearings. Sincerely, DAVID A. BRODY, Director. STATEMENT OF THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF THE UNITED STATES The League of Women Voters of the United States is aware-and deeply concerned that this nation is not moving with the necessary speed and determination to fulfill the promise of civil rights legislation. We are determined to do our utmost to bring an end to poverty and discrimination in this country and to promote equality of opportunity for all Americans in the areas of education, employment and housing. On a national level since 1964 we have been studying the extent and depth of poverty and discrimination. Ours is a grass roots organization of nearly 160,000 members in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico who-on state and local levels-sought remedies to these problems for many years before the problems became a focal point of our national attention. Today League members know that employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin clearly persists despite Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Admittedly there has been some progress-but not nearly enough. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has the principal responsibility for administering Title VII. Its chief function is to promote voluntary compliance with Title VII, but the EEOC is thwarted in its efforts to fulfill its mission because there is no accompanying authority to enforce compliance. The Commission's record is impressive in one sense: the number of persons benefitting from EEOC's successful conciliation efforts has risen dramatically from 8,500 in 1967 to 30,000 in 1969. The number of charges successfully conciliated has risen from 306 in 1967 to 486 in 1969, with a corresponding rise in the number of parties charged (respondents), from 66 in 1967 to 319 in 1969. But in the same time period, the number of charges and respondents to unsuccessful conciliations far exceeds successful conciliatons: the number of charges which were unsuccessfully conciliated rose from 507 to 729; and respondents to unsuccessful conciliations rose from 86 to 398. The League believes that with authority to insist on conciliation the Commision will improve its success record, and the intent of Title VII will come closer to attainment. The experience of states with fair employment practice agencies supports the idea that the EEOC record for gaining voluntary compliance will improve when strengthened with the capability to issue cease and desist orders. Based on experience with state agencies, the Civil Rights Commission, in its 1969 Report on Equal Opportunity in State and Local Government Employment, recommends that the EEOC should be conferred with the power to issue cease and desist orders to correct violations of Title VII: Of the states presently having fair employment practice laws, the vast majority give the State commission administering the power to issue cease and desist orders. Giving EEOC similar power would enhance its conciliation role by strengthening its bargaining power and make it a far more effective agent in ensuring equal employment opportunity. The League supports the provision in HR 1746, as it hus supported similar legislation in past Congresses, to give the EEOC authority to issue cease and desist orders. The League also supports the provision in HR 1746 which would extend the commission's jurisdiction to companies hiring eight or more employees as against the 25-employee minimum in the present law, and to employees of state and local governments. This provision would extend the equal employment protection now enjoyed by 44 million workers to an additional 9.5 million workers employed by businesses with more than eight but less than 25 employees. Protection of state and local government employees against discriminatory practices is also important. Persistent and distinct discriminatory practices have been found in state and local personnel systems-systems operated by nearly 81,000 governmental units in the United States and employing nearly ten million people. The total of state and local employees has increased more than 85% since the early 1950's, while federal government employment has remained fairly constant during the same period. The increase of state and local public employment can be expected to continue as population expands and the need for public services increases-making increasingly important the protection of these employees. We have all become more sensitive in recent years to the necessity for developing within government at all levels a greater responsiveness to the needs of citizens. As government employment discrimination lessens at all levels, hiring of minority group members obviously will increase. The experiences and backgrounds of these groups will help to develop this responsiveness within government. The League of Women Voters is convinced that expanding EEOC's jurisdiction to include employees of state and local government can have a double benefit: The protection of the rights of the employees themselves and a positive effect on the government's responsiveness to the needs of all the people. We hope for the enactment of these provisions of HR 1746 to give EEOC enforcement authority and to extend its jurisdiction, believing they will erase some of the Title VII deficiencies. The federal government has a special responsibility to ensure equal employment opportunity for all Americans. Simply to set up a commission with assigned duties does not fulfill this responsibility. The EEOC must have authority to carry out its assignment. |