MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- A bill on the fast track to passing both the House and Senate would prohibit employers from requiring genetic testing of workers.

The proposal, endorsed Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, also would keep employers from hiring, firing, promoting or demoting any employees based on genetic testing they voluntarily submitted to.

"Genetics has been called the civil rights issue of our time," said Charles Collins, a St. Paul attorney who recently represented railroad workers in a high-profile court case.

Minnesota's proposal, a reaction to that case against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, is on its way to the House and Senate floors.

The railroad agreed last week to settle a union lawsuit filed after the company secretly subjected employees to genetic testing. The railroad agreed to stop genetic testing and destroy the test results and blood samples from the 18 workers who were tested.

The company also offered an apology to its employees who were secretly tested.

Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington Northern was conducting the testing to see if employees were predisposed to carpal tunnel syndrome, a wrist condition thought to be caused by repetitive hand motions.

The company agreed in February to stop its testing program after the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit contending it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was the first time that the EEOC had challenged genetic testing.

That lawsuit, which is still pending, is seeking a court order that bars all genetic testing of workers and prevents genetic test-based discrimination.

That essentially is what Minnesota's proposal would do.

But it would go further, prohibiting the use of genetic testing on relatives to make employment decisions about someone; it would also allow employees to sue employers who violated the law.

Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, told the Senate panel that such a law was needed for several reasons including that genetic testing currently only can give a picture of a handful of diseases.

"It's unfair and discriminating to single out people who test positive for the diseases we now test for," he said. "We all carry some assortment of genetic defects."

And, Kahn said, it's a privacy issue.

"Whether or not any of us would like to know what our future holds for us should be our own decision," Kahn said. "I think we would be hard-pressed to find anything more private than our genetic code."

More than 20 states ban the use of genetic screening for making employment-related decisions, and the American Management Association reported last year that only about seven of 2,100 companies surveyed conduct genetic testing.