Equal employment opportunity
Equal employment opportunity is equal opportunity in employment. Examples of legislation to foster it or to protect it from eroding include the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to assist in the protection of United States employees from discrimination. The law was the first federal law designed to protect most US employees from employment discrimination based upon that employee's (or applicant's) race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (Public Law 88-352, July 2, 1964, 78 Stat. 253, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000e et. seq.). Employment discrimination entails areas such as firing, hiring, promotions, transfer or wage practices and it is also illegal to discriminate in advertising, referral of job applicants, or classification. The Title is pertinent in companies affecting commerce that have fifteen or more employees. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is section 705 of the title.
Judicial aspects of race in the United States
Importantly, this period also saw the "Yick Wo v. Hopkins" case in 1886, which was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that was race-neutral on its face that was administered in a prejudicial manner was an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause. Although the law itself which banned wood laundries did not specify a certain race, it resulted in specifically radicalized impacts, and Yick Wo's lawyers discovered that the Chinese were singled out within the recorded minutes of the meeting. This not only established that a law with unequal impact is discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional, but strengthened the equal protection outlined in the 14th Amendment.