Senate HELP Committee

Equality finally seems to be catching on – after decades of fighting. The Supreme Court struck down the 1996 law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and today the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed out of Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with bipartisan support. ENDA prohibits discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In a 15-7 vote, all 12 Democrats on the committee supported the bill along with 3 Republicans.

The bill has been introduced in almost every Congress since 1994. During this same time period, 16 states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and 88 percent of Fortune 500 Companies have implemented non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation while 57 percent include gender identity Read more »

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee debated Senator Harkins’ reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which included an amendment to add the High School Data Transparency Act to the ESEA. The amendment would require high schools to publicly report data on how many girls and boys are playing sports and how much money schools are spending on their teams. Read more »

This post was cross-posted from ACSBlog.

This week the Senate HELP Committee will vote on the nomination of Thomas Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor. In the midst of the many unfair and unfounded attacks lobbed against Mr. Perez in recent weeks, an important legal doctrine for combating sex discrimination has also come under attack: disparate impact. Under Mr. Perez’s leadership as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, the Department has employed the longstanding disparate impact analysis to combat employment discrimination. Its application is not only legally sound, but exceptionally important to eliminate discrimination and further justice.

The Supreme Court and Congress have long made clear that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “prohibits employers from using employment practices that cause a disparate impact” based on sex and other protected classes. The doctrine of disparate impact allows for a remedy when an employment practice that may be neutral on its face has an unjustified adverse effect on members of a protected class.

Disparate impact has been crucial to addressing entrenched discriminatory employment practices. Indeed, women’s entry into high-wage, nontraditional occupations has been made possible in large part by challenges to unfortunate employment practices that disproportionately disadvantage women, which would have otherwise remained unchanged but for the Title VII’s disparate impact doctrine. Courts, for example, have struck down height, weight or strength requirements implemented by employers in police departments, fire departments, in construction and in correctional facilities because the requirements were not related to job performance, but instead reflected stereotypes about the skills required for a position. Moreover, there are often alternative practices that may both satisfy job performance demands and allow for a diverse workforce. Read more »

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee issued a searing indictment of for-profit colleges. The report, “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success,” was the result of Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)’s two-year investigation into the growing for-profit higher education sector.

The report found that although for-profit colleges, in theory, have an important role to play in higher education and should be well-equipped to meet the needs of non-traditional students—such as older students and single parents—the reality is quite different.

For-profit education is a big money-making industry that puts profits ahead of student success. More widgets = more profit. Except for that the widgets in this case are students. So it’s no surprise that companies that the report examined spent $4.2 billion (with a capital “B”) on marketing and recruiting, equivalent to 22.7% of all revenue.

This incentive structure has led to aggressive, misleading, and deceptive recruiting practices that look a lot like a sales process. For example, training materials from some for-profits showed that recruiters were taught to locate and manipulate prospective students’ fears.

And it’s working! These schools sink incredible amounts of money on marketing and recruiting, and are reaping incredible profits. In 2009, publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of nearly 20% (and paid their CEOs an average of $7.2 million). Read more »