Labor Officials Allege Pattern of Gender Bias at McDonnell

Stepping up the pressure in a wide-ranging workplace investigation, federal labor officials have accused the former McDonnell Douglas Corp. of a pattern of discrimination against women.

The U.S. Labor Department recently sent a notice alleging that the aerospace company paid three female employees less than their male counterparts at its Long Beach plant and failed to promote the women even though they were better qualified than men who got the jobs.

While the document focused on alleged violations involving the three women, two of whom are Orange County residents, it also said the Labor Department’s three-year investigation found a pattern of discriminatory salary and promotion disparities that violates rules for federal contractors.

The notice was sent Dec. 31 to Boeing Co., which acquired McDonnell Douglas in August. The move indicates that federal officials are frustrated with the slow progress in resolving the larger discrimination issues that could affect up to 200 women and minorities at the plant, one government official said Wednesday.

Labor and McDonnell Douglas officials began settlement talks last June.

“This is still an open investigation,” Tino Serrano, a Labor Department spokesman, said Wednesday. He declined to comment further.

Boeing has not officially received the notice yet, though it is believed to be in the huge Seattle company’s internal mail system, said Boeing spokesman Peter Conte. He declined to comment on the findings.

The company has five days after receiving the notice to set up a meeting with federal officials to resolve the matter informally. If the two sides fail to reach an agreement, the Labor Department could file a formal complaint with an administrative law judge.

Ultimately, the company could be barred from working on lucrative federal contracts.

According to the notice, the company has denied that it has discriminated against the women, pointing out that it has promoted as many women as men and that statistics show that women haven’t suffered any “adverse impact of wages.”

But the federal agency’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs went beyond the company’s statistics to uncover what it said was a “pattern and practice” of discrimination both in salaries and in promotions.

The women filed complaints about pay disparities, lack of promotions and retaliation in December 1995, while the labor office was conducting a routine compliance review of McDonnell Douglas as a federal contractor building the C-17 military transport.

At the time, McDonnell was still suffering from management problems and financial constraints that led to a loss of more than 30,000 jobs at the Long Beach plant during the early 1990s.

Other aerospace and defense contractors also were severely hurt, but they didn’t experience the flood of discrimination complaints that were filed against McDonnell Douglas.

McDonnell Douglas was named in 41% of all discrimination claims filed against major aerospace and defense companies in the state over a five-year period, according to the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing. That figure is well above the company’s 22% share of the California employees in that industry. Most of the claims have been resolved.

The Labor Department unit had kept a lid on the investigation until last summer, when word leaked about the huge number of complaints. But its notice in the case of the three women provides the first insight into its investigation.

While McDonnell’s pay policies appeared to be “neutral,” the notice says, further analysis revealed that management’s implementation of the policies are “subjective, inconsistent and not uniformly applied.”

Looking at a host of employees with the same titles, the office found that the company generally paid women less than men “in the same job title and salary range,” even though women had comparable skills and responsibilities.

Furthermore, the office said, women have more seniority, more total work experience and equal or more years of education than their male counterparts, yet are paid less.