Skip to main content

Happening This Week: U.S. House To Vote on Equality Act

 

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representative is expected to vote on the Equality Act, a piece of legislation that would prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ workers in the workplace.

Readers might recall that the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a previous ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia in which the Court held that an employer that terminates an employer for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  While the U.S. House had approved a version of the Equality Act last session which would have codified the Court’s ruling from Bostock, the legislation never made it past the Senate with Senate Republicans grounding the bill.

With the new legislative session starting recently, however, the Equality Act was reintroduced in the House.  With a vote expected to take place on Thursday, it is widely expected the legislation will obtain a majority vote and make it to the Senate.  (After all, Democrats still have majority control of the House.)  Upon arrival in the Senate is when things get tricky.  In order to avoid a filibuster on the Equality Act (which would likely kill the bill), supporters of the legislation would need at least 60 votes.  Even with Democrats regaining majority control of the Senate during the 2020 elections, they do not have enough votes to avoid a filibuster...unless they can get some Republican Senators to support the Equality Act.  Even if Democrats can get a few Republican Senators to jump to the other side, I highly doubt they will get the votes needed to avoid a filibuster.

While the Equality Act certainly has a better chance of becoming law now than it did during the last legislative session, there is still much doubt that the legislation will make it to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.


For additional information:  https://www.hrc.org/news/lgbtq-equality-is-a-unifying-issue-for-our-nation-equality-act-reintroduced-in-congress

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NLRB: Discussion Among Employees About Tip Pooling is Protected Concerted Activity

  This Advice Memorandum from the National Labor Relations Board’s Associate General Counsel, Jayme Sophir, addressed whether employees which discussed and complained about tip pooling at work constituted protected concerted activity. In relevant part, an employer in New York operated a chain of steakhouses.  While tip pooling was in place at these steakhouses, some of the employees objected to it on the grounds that it was not transparent and improperly divided tips among the workers.  Employees were told not to complain or talk to each other about the tip pool and were told that doing so would endanger their jobs.  Despite the employer later attempting to provide some clarity as to how the tips were being divided, rancor still existed among some employees.  At one point, the employees were told by a general manager that some employees that had been talking about the tip pool were “cleared out” and the employer would continue to do so. In the Advice Memorandum, it was noted that emplo
Post a Comment
Read more

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A few years ago, I remember when the “Fight for $15” movement was taking off around the country.  Lo and behold, it appears that a $15/hour minimum wage is not the stopping point, which should be no surprise.  As the below article notes, New York is aggressively moving to ramp up hourly wage rates even higher.  While all the  below articles are worth a read, I called particular attention to that one. As always, below are a couple article that caught my eye this week. Disney World Workers Reject Latest Contract Offer Late last week, it was announced that workers at Disney World had rejected the most recent contract offer from the company, calling on their employer to do better.  As Brooks Barnes at The New York Times writes, the unions that represent about 32,000 workers at Disney World reported their members resoundingly rejected the 5 year contract offer which would have seen workers receive a 10% raise and retroactive increased back pay.  While Disney’s offer would have increased pa
Post a Comment
Read more

Utah Non-Compete Bill Falters in House

Last month, a non-compete bill sponsored by Representative Brian Greene (Republican from Pleasant Grove) & up for vote in the Utah House failed to make it through the Legislature.  The bill sought to ban enforcement of non-competes if they came after a worker was already employed, given no compensation (such as a bonus or promotion) for signing the non-compete, and laid off within six months.  However, by a 22 - 49 vote, the bill was resoundingly defeated after some business groups lobbied to kill the non-compete bill.  One group in particular, The Free Enterprise Utah coalition, argued that the Utah State Legislature should hold off on any changes to non compete laws in the state until a survey about non competes was done among Utah businesses.  Representative Greene had countered this claim and argued that a survey was not needed to show that the current non compete laws in the states allowed many businesses, including some small high tech companies in the state, to per
Post a Comment
Read more