South Florida Personal Injury Blog

The House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee began hearing testimony this Wednesday on proposed changes to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which would extend employment discrimination protections to cover the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity, Fort Lauderdale injury lawyer Andrew Alitowski reports. Most of the witnesses offered testimony that was supportive of the law as a way to protect more Americans from workplace discrimination. Committee chair George Miller, a Democrat from California, stated that the proposed law, the Employment Non-Ciscrimination Act or ENDA, would ensure that employment decisions were not based on prejudice. “Fully qualified individuals are being denied employment or are being fired from their jobs for completely non-work-related reasons,” he said. “This is profoundly unfair and, indeed, un-American. And it is bad for business.”

Title VII was a landmark civil rights law which prohibited discrimination against employees based on their race, sex or religion. Later amendments have also banned discrimination based on age and disability, says Broward personal injury attorney Alitowski. The law has been interpreted to prohibit employers from engaging in a wide range of discriminatory activities including discriminating in promotions, hiring and firing and preventing workplace harassment. Certain groups such as the armed services, veterans’ groups, religious organizations and businesses with less than 15 employees are exempt from the requirement of Title VII.

Bills which have would have extended Title VII protections to gays and lesbians have been proposed since the mid 1970s when Congressman Ed Koch and congresswoman Bella Abzug introduced the “gay rights bill” in the wake of the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. ENDA came within one vote of passage in the United States Senate in 1996, but has languished since then. Supporters of ENDA have debated whether the law should expand protections to people who have faced workplace discrimination based on gender identity in addition to sexual orientation with opponents arguing that extending protections to include gender identity is too divisive and will hurt the bills overall chances of passage. A version of ENDA passed the House of Representatives in 2007, but was not voted on in the Senate after a veto threat from then President George W. Bush. President Obama has stated that he is supportive of ENDA as well as other legislation which prohibits workplace discrimination.