EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

Equal Employment Opportunity

Equal Employment Opportunity

Introduction

The struggle against employment discrimination has been one of the defining features of American life for decades. It was at the heart of the civil rights movement. At the 1949 hearings on equal employment opportunity (EEO) in the U.S. House of Representatives, both Clarence Mitchell testifying on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Representative Adam Clayton Powell, one of the chief congressional proponents of civil rights legislation, emphasized that passage of an EEO bill had first priority in their legislative program, taking precedence over bills dealing with voting, lynching, and segregation in public accommodations.

EEO is at the heart of the contemporary women's movement, as well. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 partly out of anger at the federal government's refusal to take the prohibition of sex discrimination included in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. NOW's first demonstration—perhaps the first feminist demonstration in five decades—was a protest against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) failure to enforce the law. For Jews, Mexican-Americans, and other groups as well, the fight against employment discrimination was central to their struggle to become entire participants in American society.

Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation

The Federal Equal Employment Opportunity legislation begins in the early 1940s much has changed. Most notably, the movement succeeded, through only after a prolonged fight. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin and sex. Discrimination is prohibited by a number of executive orders, other laws, and major judicial decisions, as well. (This includes discrimination against white men; legally, all race and both sexes are protected equally.) Growing experience in enforcing the Equal Employment Opportunity has led many people to change their ideas about discrimination and about how to eliminate it; this in turn has led to amendments to Title VII, most recently in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Economic and sociological theories about discrimination have changed and so, as a result, have ideas about what to do about it. The struggle against discrimination has broadened to incorporate other groups (in the United States, there are now prohibitions against discrimination) on the basis of age and disability and to include many other countries around the world. The debate about discrimination has become much more complex, as some of those involved demand ...