WASHINGTON — President Bush and Senate leaders Friday hailed a compromise on civil rights legislation that would make it easier for workers to win discrimination suits and also would give victims of sex discrimination the right to sue for limited damages.

At a news conference, Bush asserted that the compromise is "going to hit a lick against discrimination in the workplace." He said that he would "enthusiastically sign" the measure after its expected passage by Congress. The Senate is expected to formally approve it Monday, with House action to follow.

"It is not a quota bill," the President declared in referring to his oft-repeated charge that a very similar measure, sponsored by Republican Sen. John C. Danforth of Missouri with the backing of many Democrats, would force employers to hire specific numbers of women and racial minorities.

The compromise agreement, reached Thursday night after 11 hours of negotiations involving top White House aides and key Republican and Democratic senators, broke a yearlong impasse punctuated by charges that Democrats favored unfair quotas and that Republicans were cynically using race as a political issue.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the chief Democratic negotiator, called the compromise "a significant victory for civil rights" that would reverse two Supreme Court decisions and restore workers' rights to challenge discriminatory business practices.

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said that the new bill "will untie the Gordian knot of civil rights--and without producing quotas."

The compromise bill makes several major changes in federal anti-discrimination laws that will ease the way for workers seeking to prove that they have been discriminated against and increase the reward they can receive if they win in court.

The biggest change involves what lawyers call the "burden of proof"--the question of which side in a lawsuit has the job of proving its case. Under the bill, if a worker can show that a company's hiring or promotion policies have had a discriminatory result, it is then up to the company to prove that the policies are justified. That had been the law from 1971 until 1989, but a Supreme Court decision shifted the rules, requiring workers to prove that a company's policies are not justified, something that civil rights lawyers argue is often impossible to do.