Job-Discrimination Claims Pile Up With Budget Cuts

It’s been nearly four years since Air National Guard employee Wynona James filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But she hasn’t seen a dime of the $100,000 that was awarded to her.

An administrative judge in Indianapolis last year found four Air National Guard supervisors guilty of “malicious retaliation” against James, who is black, by painting her as a terrorist.

She hasn’t heard anything about payment since the Air National Guard appealed the ruling in December.

“They say they are overworked,” she said of the EEOC staff.

James’ case is one in the growing inventory of cases yet to be resolved at the agency, which investigates claims of job discrimination across the country.

The backlog rose 12% from 2004 to 2005, reaching 33,562 last year.

The EEOC has lost 20% of its staff since 2001, when a hiring freeze was instituted, and it now faces budget reductions, with the Bush administration proposing to cut the agency’s budget by $4 million next year.

The EEOC’s case backlog is expected to be nearly 48,000 by 2007.

“That’s 48,000 citizens who have been harmed. That’s not acceptable,” said Andrea Brooks, a national vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employee union.

The union and civil rights organizations are leading the Protect Your Job campaign to urge the restoration of EEOC funding.

Last month, the campaign began running newspaper and radio ads nationally.

“I am still naive enough to believe that the reason people aren’t in the streets and rising up is because they don’t know,” Brooks said.

For more than 40 years, the EEOC has investigated workplace discrimination based on sex, race, age, national origin, religion and disability.

But the EEOC’s ability to protect workers and job applicants is being seriously damaged, critics contend.

Part of the problem, they say, is a controversial reorganization that has been in the works under EEOC Chairwoman Cari M. Dominguez, who was appointed by President Bush.

The reorganization plan includes a national call center to answer public inquiries, staffed by operators rather than the trained specialists who formerly handled such calls.

The plan also downgraded eight of the EEOC’s 23 district offices to field offices, with less authority and fewer personnel.

Critics have charged that Dominguez, under marching orders from the White House, is complicit in an agenda to ease the burden on employers at the expense of workers.

EEOC spokesman Charles Robbins said in an e-mailed statement that the agency, though under budgetary constraints, remained dedicated to its mission and “committed to the vigorous enforcement of the laws prohibiting employment discrimination.”

Nick Inzeo, director of the office of field operations at the EEOC, said limited resources required that cuts be made.

If supervisory staff at the district offices had not been eliminated, he said, the agency would have had to cut back staffers who interact directly with people, such as investigators, mediators, litigating attorneys and program analysts.

“These are tight times, but we will continue to do our work the best we can, given the resources that we are given,” Inzeo said.