Abstract
The U.S. government took action against discrimination in employment for the first time in June 1941. The country had not yet entered World War II, but the Roosevelt Administration was engaged in maximizing the production of armaments and keeping up an adequate flow of consumer goods while millions of male workers were being drafted into the armed forces. A. Phillip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of black male railroad workers, was incensed by the exclusion of blacks from the new jobs in the defense plants, and saw an opportunity to advance the cause of racial justice. He threatened the Administration with a march of black people on Washington if something was not done about discrimination against blacks in employment.
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Notes
Michael Evans Gold, “A Tale of Two Amendments: The Reasons Congress Added Sex to Title VII and their Implication for the Issue of Comparable Worth,” Duquesne Law Review 19 (1981).
Quoted in Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Susan C. Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1975), p. 231.
Edmund S. Phelps, “The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism,” American Economic Review 62 (September 1972): 659–661.
Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64.
John Helyar, “Hooters! A Case Study,” Fortune, September 1, 2003. See also http://www.hooters.com/.
Catherine A. MacKinnon and Thomas I. Emerson, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Vicki Schultz, “Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment,” Yale Law Journal 107, 6 (April 1998): 1683–1805.
See Jean R. Sternlight, “As Mandatory Binding Arbitration Meets the Class Action, Will the Class Action Survive?,” William and Mary Law Review (October 1, 2000).
Researchers have found the result of enforcement activities to be positive, but not large. See, e.g., Randall W. Eberts and Joe A. Stone, “Male-Female Differences in Promotions: EEO in Public Education,” Journal of Human Resources (fall 1985).
Also see Charles Brown, “The Federal Attack on Labor Market Discrimination: The Mouse That Roared,” in Ronald G. Ehrenberg (ed.), Research in Labor Economics, vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1982).
Nancy Kreiter, “Equal Employment Opportunity: EEOC and OFCCP,” in Dianne M. Piché, William L. Taylor, and Robin A. Reed (eds), Rights at Risk: Equality in an Age of Terrorism (Washington, DC: Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, 2002).
For a compendium of all of the texts of the relevant Executive Orders, see Jeffry A. Norris and Salvador T. Perkins, Developing Effective Affirmative Action Plans, 4th edn (Washington, DC: Employment Policy Foundation, 1993).
See OFCCP, “Companies Ineligible for Federal Contracts Under the Regulations of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs,” September 29, 1994.
See Barbara R. Bergmann, In Defense of Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1996), table 2.3. The data refer to 1992.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993), pp. 66–67.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994, p. 546.
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© 2005 Barbara R. Bergmann
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Bergmann, B.R. (2005). Government Action Against Discrimination. In: The Economic Emergence of Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982582_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982582_7
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