Rep. Andrews and House Labor Committee Pass Historic Legislation to End Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation 

The House Education and Labor Committee yesterday approved historic legislation to end workplace discrimination against Americans on the basis of sexual orientation. We have made history by taking steps to ensure that discrimination based on sexual orientation is wrong and will not be tolerated. I commend the Members who voted in favor of this long over-due legislation.

 
Currently, thirty states permit employers to fire employees based solely on their sexual orientation. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act approved yesterday is based on legislation introduced earlier this year by U.S. Reps. Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin.  If enacted, this legislation would prohibit employment discrimination, preferential treatment, and retaliation on the basis of sexual orientation by employers with 15 or more employees.

 
Last month, my subcommittee held a hearing on this important legislation.  This hearing further demonstrated the problems that exist under current law.  At the hearing, the subcommittee heard testimony from workers who had experienced job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Brooke Waites was fired from her Texas telecommunications job after her employer discovered that she is a lesbian. Since the state of Texas allows employers to fire workers based on sexual orientation, Ms. Waites had no recourse to get her job back. “In a single afternoon, I went from being a highly praised employee, to out of a job,” she testified at the hearing.

The hearing also highlighted the fact that many businesses have enacted nondiscrimination policies – both for civil rights reasons and to benefit their own competitiveness. “Perhaps the best evidence that nondiscrimination policies are good for business comes from the fact that many companies have voluntarily adopted such a policy,” testified Lee Badgett, the research director at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, at the September hearing. Badgett testified that 88 percent of Fortune 500 companies have adopted nondiscrimination policies for sexual orientation.

I want to thank advocates around the country who have pushed for legislation to guard against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. While the legislation approved today by the committee does not include gender identity, I believe that gender identity protections will eventually gain the political support necessary to pass in the future, and thus I will vote in favor of a transgender amendment on the floor of the house that will protect transgender individuals. 

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