Possibly it may well be that there are civil liberties organizations that have some problems of academic freedom and faculties may have some problems of academic freedom, so one could expect that there may be resistance to removing this exemption. You expressed the view of the absence of women being prima facie evidence of discrimination and you are aware of the fact that there are colleges who turn out first-rate male and female honor graduates, but if you look at the faculties of these colleges, you will see that the woman, as was said so eloquently the other day, "simply disappear" as the ranks grow higher. I would now like to make just one or two statements in answer to a question you raised the other day about the EEOC action and help wanted ads, the sex segregation. You also made the comment, you asked the rhetorical question: can you imagine what would happen if there were adverse advertisements, black or white only, and my own experience includes the struggle in the 1930's and 1940's to get "white only" or "black" or "Negro" out of the help wanted ads. EEOC, as you know, issued the guideline. The American Newspaper Publishers Association went into court and tried to get a temporary restraining order, asserting that EEOC had no authority to issue a guideline and that it was causing irreparable loss of revenues to the newspapers. The court refused to grant the injunction, but ruled that since EEOC has no authority to enforce its rules, these rulings do not have the force of law because ultimately they must be enforced by the courts. So this left EEOC with the right to issue the guideline, but no enforcement power behind it. Now a plaintiff by the name of Brush, Brush v. San Francisco Newspaper Publishing, has gone into court against the San Francisco Chronicle charging discrimination under title VII. As you know, the general notion is that a newspaper is not an employer, when it is not engaging in employment, but EEOC has entered that case amicus and is arguing that when putting ads or publishing want ads, in effect, the newspaper is acting as an employment agency and, therefore, in its capacity as an employment agency it is within the jurisdiction of the EEOC and subject to the prohibition of the act. I am told by legal counsel in EEOC that they don't think they will win the case in the lower court and it will obviously go up on an appeal to the ninth circuit. I want to emphasize the great necessity for enforcement powers for EEOC if one is concerned about equal employment opportunity for women. Women as a group carry the largest burden in the country for enforcing equal employment opportunity rights. For the reason that only roughly about 20 out of the 36 jurisdictions which have FEP laws included sex at the present time. This means that all of the women in the other States have to appeal to the Federal act and since the Federal act has no enforcement powers, this means that economic burden upon women to go into court, to hire a lawyer, and to carry this burden alone is very great. So enforcement powers for EEOC would be of particular advantage to women. I also want to point out that the present tendency on the part of some courts to give a broad interpretation to the bona fide occupational qualification, would, if upheld ultimately by the Supreme Court, sound a death knell of title VII and its benefits to women. There is presently pending before the Supreme Court a case called Phillips v. Martin-Marietta, certiorari has been granted. This was a case involving the issue as as to whether an employer has the right under title VII not to hire a mother of preschool-age children, and this is the issue that is to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Recognizing that some 10 million working mothers have children under 18, some 6 million children under six, some 2.2 million children under three, so that should the employer's interpretation prevail, this would be a serious blow to working mothers who have to work. Mrs. GREEN. Mr. Hogan advises me we have a witness appearing on this particular matter. Dr. MURRAY. Another case which is very serious is Dias v. Pan American Airlines. The airlines have fought consistently and vigorously since the inception of EEOC to persuade the Commission and the courts to rule that sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for being an airline stewardess or an in-flight cabin attendant. EEOC has taken the position that the job can be satisfactorily performed by both sexes. Mrs. GREEN. Have they taken the same position on pilots? Dr. MURRAY. Yes, yes; there is a case now pending in the California court of a young woman who has sued one of the western-based airlines on this issue. Mrs. GREEN. I wrote the president of United Airlines on the flight from New York to Chicago, which was called the Executive Flightfor men only. Dr. MURRAY. They have taken it off. Mrs. GREEN. This appears in the exchange of correspondence. They first told me, by the way, that obviously the people liked it. Through the years I have heard of the "cooks' polls" in regard to blacks. You know, "my cook tells me they like it the way it is," and, it would seem none of the cooks objected to discrimination against Negroes. Now I am pretty wary of people telling me about the wives' polls. "My wife tells me that she doesn't feel any discrimination." Now on the airlines we are told that discrimination is perfectly all right, because the passengers like it that way-men and women. Well, I know many women executives who did not like it that way. They were inconvenienced and felt discriminated against. Dr. MURRAY. Unfortunately, a Federal district court has bought that argument and I do hope counsel will make that decision available to you to read on a day when your blood pressure is very, very low. The court has come down hard on the fact that customer preference can be a BOFQ, and should that principle stand, it would mean that clients might say they didn't want a woman lawyer and I would be out of a job. You could go the whole range, wherever women are trying to break through professionally if such a decision stands. It is customer preference, along with some other language which I think you would be very interested in. Mr. HOGAN. Do you have that case citation? Dr. MURRAY. It is Dias v. Pan American, and if you have access to CCH employment practices, you can probably pick it up very quickly in the index. It may be 62 Labor cases, I can't give you the paragraph number. I think this about covers the questions you had raised and I want to answer them for you. Mrs. GREEN. I thank you very much and I am deeply indebted to all three of you, and I hope we may have many conversations together in the future. We will go over all the material and, as I said before, I want this the most complete record that has been assembled in terms of the discrimination in both the legislative and executive branches and in all other forms of discrimination against women. Dr. MURRAY. May I add just one final footnote? When the task force report was presented the other day, we neglected to point out that the consensus in the plenary session of the Women's Bureau Conference was not only that there be implementation of the provisions, the general provisions of the task force, but that there be special attention given to the minority views of Dorothy Haener calling for bringing domestic workers and the low-paid workers, bringing all workers within the reach of Federal power under the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Because it was a minority view, there was danger that it might seem not to be a part of a consensus here. Mrs. GREEN. Mr. Hogan tells me she is also on the list of prospective witnesses. Again, I extend my thanks. We may have one day of hearings next week and then we probably will devote most of the week of June 29, to this subject. Thank you very much. (Whereupon, at 1:10 p.m. the special subcommittee adjourned, to reconvene at the call of the Chair.) DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 1970 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION Washington, D.C. The special subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m. in room 2251 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edith Green (chairman of the special subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Green and Dellenback. Also present: Harry Hogan, counsel; and Sheldon Batchelder, minority research assistant. Mrs. GREEN. The subcommittee will come to order for the further consideration of legislation pending before it. Specifically, this morning we will be directing our attention to section 805 of H.R. 16098. The first witness we have before the committee is Sylvia Roberts. Mrs. Roberts is an attorney from Louisiana and is the regional director for the South of the National Organization for Women. On behalf of the committee, may I welcome you this morning, Mrs. Roberts. We are delighted you are here and appreciate the time that you have taken out of your schedule. Proceed with your statement as you wish. STATEMENT OF SYLVIA ROBERTS, ATTORNEY, SECRETARY OF THE LOUISIANA COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN, AND REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF THE SOUTH, NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) Mrs. ROBERTS. Thank you, Mrs. Green. My testimony will be directed at litigation under title VII. I am specifically going to describe circumstances arising in the case of Weeks v. Southern Bell Telephone Co., 408 F. 2d 228 (5 Cir. 1969). This was the first case on sex discrimination to reach the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I think it points up the real abuse of and delays that are involved in securing enforcement under title VII. This is to point up another fact, that without further enforcement powers, without a method of really getting at sex discrimination in employment, women are truly helpless today under title VII, in my view. I would like to give a very brief explanation of the facts concerning Mrs. Weeks and her claim. This case arises in Georgia and involves a woman who worked as an operator from the time she left high school in 1947. She was employed in a small telephone office in which she was ready to do everything and anything. She became very familiar with 383 the switching equipment and all the equipment there in the telephone company's office. She was able to meet most any emergency. I wanted to point out one thing about the telephone company. They have a traffic department and a plant department. Traffic means women operators. Plant means men and installers and cable repairmen and this sort of thing. The significant thing there is that the highest paying traffic, or woman's job, pays less than the lowest paying plant job or man's job. There is no flow from one to the other. Women are in the traffic department exclusively and men are in the plant department in Georgia. Mrs. Weeks had sort of broken a barrier as being employed outside as plant clerk in the plant department and then she learned of an opening in the job of switchman. This is a job which is inside and involves the transmission of calls and making sure that these recorded messages advising the subscriber that the telephone number is no longer in service-these kinds of things are working correctly. Having been commended by her superviser as a very good plant clerk, in March of this particular year, 1966, she applied or learned that the job of switchman was open and she submitted her bid. There was only one other bidder for this job, a man, who was junior in seniority to Mrs. Weeks. Under the union contract with the Communication Workers of America, the senior employee gets the job. There is no stipulation about sex in the union contract. The day following the submission of her bid, her supervisor placed an unsatisfactory work performance notice in her personnel folder. The significance of this is that in a bidding on a job, if a person has an unsatisfactory work performance, then their bid is almost doomed to not being accepted. Fortunately, the CWA representative was in her vicinity that day and was able to get this unsatisfactory work record, which was purely spurious and based on absolutely nothing, expunged from her record. A few more days passed and she was told that her bid was going to be returned. It was returned because the job of switchman was not going to be assigned to a woman. No reason, but it was not going to be assigned to a woman. She had heard of the existence of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1966, in the early days of that organization. She wrote to that agency and eventually an investigation was conducted. I say "eventually" because this was in the initial stages of the EEOC. They had very little staffing and it was my information from a former commissioner that they didn't really expect sex discrimination complaints in the first place. They were surprised when women did complain. They did investigate her complaint and a finding was made that the job could be performed by Mrs. Weeks; there was no reason she could not perform all the functions of a switchman, and the refusal of her bid violated title VII. The only procedure open then was to conciliate with the company by the EEOC, and this failed. At this stage she was very effectively barred from a job which paid her $51.50 a week more than she was earning as a plant clerk. She had no money so she asked the court to appoint her an attorney. Several months later she had a trial, after which the U.S. District Court ruled that the job of switchman could be denied to her because it involved strenuous activity and the lifting of a 31-pound relay time-testing set and violated a Georgia regulation forbidden women and minors lifting weights in excess of 30 pounds. |