Filipino Group Accuses L.A. County of Job Bias

A second Los Angeles County employee organization representing minority workers has accused the county of “systemic racial discrimination” in a complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The Los Angeles County Filipino-American Employees Assn., which says it represents about 1,500 of the county’s 1,700 Filipino employees, contends that many of those workers have been the victims of racial bias in promotion and job assignments.

The association, in a recent letter to equal employment commissioner Tony E. Gallegos, asked federal officials to file discrimination charges against the county and singled out the Departments of Health Services, Mental Health and Public Social Services as the worst offenders.

“We want the commission to investigate and act on our complaints of systemic racial discrimination,” P. Bebs Tantoy, president of the county’s Filipino employee group, said Monday.

“There have been cases where Filipinos have been bypassed for promotion, blocked from moving upward and been harassed in some departments,” said Tantoy who also works as an investigator in the county’s affirmative action compliance office.

The letter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission follows a similar complaint by the Los Angeles Chicano Employees Assn., which triggered a federal investigation in October into allegations of racial discrimination and “unlawful employment practices” against Latinos in the county health services agency.

In its complaint, the Chicano organization charged that the county had failed to bring sufficient numbers of Latinos into the 66,000-member county work force. Although more than 12,000 county employees are Latino, or about 18% of the work force, that figure falls far short of parity with the 27.6% Latino population recorded in the county in the 1980 Census.

By comparison, Filipinos make up about 2% of the county work force, while making up 1.5% of the county population. However, Tantoy said most of those jobs are lower paying and that Filipinos are under-represented at the management level.

For example, Filipinos exceeded the population percentage in the Department of Health Services in 1986, according to county figures. But out of 724 management positions, only 12 were filled by Filipinos.

Robert Arias, the county’s affirmative action compliance officer, said he had not seen the letter from the Filipino employees but added that he met Monday with some community activists who expressed concerns about Filipinos in the county work force.

“We will look at those charges, look at the data and then come up with some conclusions,” Arias said. He added that he intends to investigate all discrimination charges made by Filipino county employees over the last year.

Gallegos was unavailable for comment Monday.

Michael Baldonado, a special assistant to Gallegos in Washington, acknowledged that the commission has received the letter from the Filipino organization. But he said he is prohibited from commenting on that complaint or on the earlier one by the Latino group.