Bush Labor Dept. Dropping Equal Opportunity Survey

by James Parks, Sep 13, 2006

The Bush administration’s Labor Department is eliminating yet another worker protection. (Visit the AFL-CIO BushWatch site for more Bush outrages against working families.)

The Labor Department is eliminating the annual Equal Opportunity Survey, which is used to help the agency identify contractors most likely engaging in systematic discrimination against women and people of color, and so most likely to merit investigation, according to the Workers Independent News (WIN).

The Bush administration first proposed getting rid of the survey in April, claiming it didn’t work. The Clinton administration set up the survey in 2000 as part of its initiative to ensure equal pay for women. The Labor Department initially sent the survey, which measures employers’ affirmative action performance and pay by gender and race, to 50,000 of the more than 100,000 federal contractors. But the Bush administration reduced the number of annual surveys to just 10,000.

In comments opposing the Bush administration’s move to eliminate the survey, the AFL-CIO said in March:

Elimination of the Equal Opportunity Survey would not only hinder OFCCP’s [Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs] enforcement mission, but would also suggest to the public that the administration is not committed to that mission.

In an April letter to the Labor Department, Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), said:

This requirement has been the lynchpin in successfully encouraging compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A reversal of this policy would mean a redirection back to the status of Jim Crow.

Speaking on WIN, Jocelyn Samuels of the National Women’s Law Center said:

This decision to rescind the Equal Opportunity Survey will be a tremendous disservice to enforcement efforts and to the employees in the workforce who are intended to be protected.

Samuels says elimination of the Equal Opportunity Survey lets federal contractors who discriminate off the hook and fails to protect workers from sex and race discrimination in federal projects.

Click here to check out George W. Bush’s record on civil and human rights.

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