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Show (Not printed at Government expense) ltongrcssional Rccord United States oj America 89th CONGRESS PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE SECOND SESSION Women Are Being Deprived of Legal Rights by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission these men would understand the neces SPEECH sity of prohibiting discrimination be I had expected that these cause of sex. men would have a high degree of com passion for the underprivileged and great respect for facts. Surely, I thought, they could not fail to see the close relationship OF HON. MARTHA W. GRIFFITHS OF MICHIGAN IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Monday, June 20, 1966 Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Mr. Speaker, I re gret that it has become necessary to tell the House about the disregard of the en forcement of the law shown by key offi cials of the Equal Employment Opportu nity Commission toward the provisions of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbid employment discrimination on the basis of sex. These EEOC officials are completely out of step with the Presi dent, the rest of the administration, the courts, and indeed the country as a whole. They disregard the fact that Congress, by enacting title VII, declared a national policy against discrimination in employ ment based on sex. They close their eyes to the President's insistence on encourag ing greater employment of women at every level. It apparently makes no dif ference to them that a three-judge Fed eral court ruled in February--,-White against Crook-that the ment protects 14th women from amend discrimina tory State laws; pertaining to jury duty, or that 48 States have established com missions on the status of women. I charge that the officials of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have displayed a wholly negative attitude toward the sex provisions of title VII. would remind them I that they took an oath to uphold the law-not just the part of it that they are interested in. In the beginning, I excused their un professional attitude on the assumption that these men had not ever really hOUght rely, thought, about I sex discrimination. when the evidence of dIscrimination began to pile up in the form of case histories 222-168--3703 and statistics ' This emphasis on odd or hypothetical cases has fostered public ridicule which undermines the effectiveness of the law, and disregards the real problems of sex discrimination in employment. By em phasizing the difficulties of applying the law in these odd cases, the impression is between race discrimination and sex dis created that compliance with the law is crimination and to understand that race unnecessary discrimination in employment would be can only half eradicated if employment dis wholly overlooked. crimination continued on the basis of Surely, I thought, they would not sex. that its enforcement and and will be delayed indefinitely or I ask in all seriousness: What is this sickness that causes an official to ridi ignore the fact that women's wages are cule the law he swore to uphold and en much less than men's and that the poor force? est families Nation the in are those headed by women. negative their But attitude has changed for the worse. They started out by casting disrespect and ridicule on the law. At the White House Conference on Equal Opportunity in August 1965 they focused their attention on such silly is sues as whether the law now requires "Playboy" clubs to hire male "bunnies." More recently; the Executive Director Are such men qualified profes sionally to enforce title VII? Are they qualified temperamentally? Can they properly enforce this law when they are hostile to one of the groups the law was designed to protect? sible for a Is it humanly pos person to be genuinely con cerned about the rights of "some" oth ers but not "all" others? What kind of mentality is it that can ignore the fact that women's wages are much less than men's, and that Negro of the Commission, Mr. Herman Edels women's wages are least of all? Here are the facts for workers Annual Conference on Labor-Labor Re ployed year-round full time: the median earnings of white men are $6,497, of Negro men $4,285, of white women $3,859, and of Negro women $2,674. This adverse differential exists in spite berg, speaking at New York University's lations Reporter of April 25, 1966, 61 LRR 253-255-stated that the sex provision of title VII was a out of wedlock." "fluke" and "conceived This is the same Mr. Edelsberg, who in his first press confer ence as Executive Director of the EEOC, stated that he and others at the EEOC thought men were "entitled" to have fe male secretaries. The House and Senate, of course, have resisted these calls to natural rights and gone along for years with male reporters. The current issue of the EEOC News- letter, May-June 1966, emphasizes such oddities as whether woman as a refusal to hire a a dog warden, or a man as a "house mother" for a house, violates the law. college sorority em of the fact that white females in the labor force have 12.3 years of education on the average as compared to 12.2 years for white men; and nonwhite fe males have 11.1 years of education to The un 10 for the nonwhite males. employment rate is highest for the non The same disparities ex white female. ist when we examine the data for all workers, including temporary as well as full time. At this point in the RECORD I include three tables showing data education, and by and race. on earnings, unemployment, by sex I believe these facts are |
