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Bush Administration Strangling EEOC—Workers’ Best Recourse Against Discrimination |
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Workers across the nation are in danger of losing the federal agency charged with protecting employees and job applicants from workplace discrimination, union and civil rights activists say. Unless the Bush administration is stopped, it will strip the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to the bones and make it totally ineffective, according to AFGE, a union representing 600,000 federal employees. That’s why AFGE, along with the AFL-CIO and other union and civil rights organizations, launched a national campaign to save the agency.
The EEOC is being prevented from doing its job effectively by a lack of personnel and a reduced budget, says Andrea Brooks, AFGE’s vice president for women and fair practices. The agency already is suffering from a five-year hiring freeze and has lost 20 percent of its workforce through attrition. The agency also has a backlog of tens of thousands of cases, projected to reach 48,000 in fiscal year 2007. Yet, the Bush administration wants to cut its budget by $4 million next year.
To make matters worse, Brooks says, the Bush administration also is trying to weaken the agency’s ability to enforce anti-discrimination rules through a reorganization plan that takes away enforcement powers from local offices and reduces staff, rolling back the rights of federal workers by eliminating administrative trial rights and weakening access to the EEOC for the millions of workers covered by the nation’s civil rights laws.
In a statement, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson cited several examples of what the EEOC has accomplished in the past few months when it has the resources it needs:
- Wal-Mart agreed to pay $315,000 to employees in central Florida who were sexually harassed.
- A software training company in Virginia agreed to pay $50,000 to an employee who, according to the EEOC suit filed in his behalf, was fired illegally when he revealed he was HIV-positive.
- A radiology benefits management firm in Arizona paid $450,000 to three employees who, according to the EEOC suit filed in their behalf, were fired because they refused an order not to hire African Americans or Jews for a client.
“For countless workers, it [the EEOC] is their best recourse—sometimes their only recourse—against discrimination,” Chavez-Thompson said. “For every victim of discrimination caught in this backlog, justice delayed is justice denied. That is wrong.”
Brooks told Workers’ Independent News radio she believes the Bush White House is trying to eliminate the agency and the protections it offers workers:
When you get rid of the employees you get rid of people who know what they are doing. Then you are not available to the public to take their cases of discrimination. If you do not have an agency charged with addressing that concern then you cannot alleviate the pain and suffering that people have.
The campaign to save EEOC includes a public awareness campaign on radio and in newspaper advertisements sponsored by AFGE in major U.S. cities. The radio ads are broadcast on Radio One radio stations.
The newspaper and radio ads debuted last month in 14 cities: Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; Cheyenne, Wyo.; Chicago; Dallas; El Paso, Texas; Los Angeles; Miami; Montgomery, Ala.; New York; San Francisco; and the Washington, D.C., metro area.
In addition, the campaign features a new website, www.protectyourjob.org, which includes information about the campaign, previews the advertisements and hosts an EEOC campaign blog and links to letters demanding more funding for the EEOC that can be e-mailed directly to members of Congress. The site also features a list of civil rights organizations representing a variety of interests and issues.
Unless the attack on the EEOC is reversed, millions of people will be at risk for unemployment, says Edward Coyle, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans. Speaking at a June 13 press conference to announce the campaign to save EEOC, in Washington, D.C., Coyle said:
Many Americans are hitting what some have coined the “silver ceiling,” where age discrimination prevents continued employment or advancement.
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, puts it this way:
Cutting funds to the EEOC is like taking a homeless person’s coat in the middle of winter—making an already bad situation worse. We need an EEOC that isn’t threadbare—one that will enforce the protections guaranteed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Other groups joining the campaign include the AFL-CIO constituency organizations the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, Coalition of Labor Union Women, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Pride At Work, as well as the Asian American Justice Center, Blacks In Government, Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities and the National Urban League.
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