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Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I support the nomination of Charlotte Burrows to be a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC. Charlotte Burrows has been a member of the EEOC since 2015. She was first confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 93-2. When she was renominated in 2019, the Senate confirmed her by voice vote. I look forward to her being confirmed a third time.

Charlotte Burrows is dedicated to ensuring that the EEOC plays a critical role in addressing systemic discrimination and advancing equal opportunity. Her priorities include advancing pay equity, preventing unlawful retaliation and harassment, addressing the use of artificial intelligence and other tech tools in employment decisions, and protecting vulnerable workers, including people with disabilities, older workers, temporary workers, and low-wage workers.

During her tenure as Chair, Ms. Burrows has helped rebuild the EEOC and its capacity to enforce Federal antidiscrimination laws--restoring staffing levels to meet the public demand for agency services. Under Ms. Burrows' leadership, the EEOC has secured more than $500 million in monetary relief for some 38,000 victims of employment discrimination, and the EEOC has filed over 140 employment discrimination lawsuits in fiscal year 2023, a 50-percent increase over fiscal year 2022.

Chair Burrows is committed to ensuring that workers are aware of their rights and employers are aware of their responsibilities. To help accomplish this goal, in fiscal year 2022, EEOC conducted over 3,300 outreach and training events and provided more than 225,000 people nationwide with information about their rights and responsibilities in the workplace. In order to reach more vulnerable workers, the EEOC conducted 1,000 outreach events for vulnerable workers that reached nearly 80,000 individuals. Often, these events were in partnership with local organizations that know these vulnerable and underserved communities the best.

During her time as Chair, she has overseen the implementation of the Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act, including advancing a bipartisan proposed rule to implement this important and much-needed law. She has also advanced a much-needed proposal to update harassment guidance and issued technical assistance on practices to prevent harassment in the Federal workplace. She has updated EEOC resources related to individuals with visual disabilities and employment protections for Americans with disabilities.

Further, she launched the Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Fairness Initiative in 2021 to ensure that these systems are used in ways that reflect values of fairness and equality. The main goal of the Chair's initiative is to assist applicants, workers, employers, and vendors to understand how Federal equal employment opportunity laws apply to these new technologies. Under her leadership, the EEOC is working to address potentially harmful uses of this technology in the workforce.

Chair Burrows' dedication to improving the lives of working families and making sure they receive the wages and benefits they deserve make her the right person to lead this agency. I thank her for her service, and I strongly support her nomination to continue as Chair of the EEOC.

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