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Getting Help From the Department of Labor: A Cautionary Tale
The Department of Labor's Office of Contract Compliance is charged
with investigating employment discrimination based on race, ethnicity or
gender and with negotiating remedies when discrimination is found. IIt
would therefor seem logical for University of California women faculty who
felt they had suffered such discrimination to turn to the Labor Department
for help. This is a brief description of the experiences of five faculty
members from various departments at UCSD who took their cases to the
OFCC. It should be instructive for others contemplating the same move.
First, the Department of Labor seemed a bit awed by the University.
The investigators accepted the University's offer of office space in the
Complex of the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, a location at once
convenient to the files and inhibiting to all but the boldest complainants.
Second, the OFCC has rules and methods one needs to be aware of: a) a
minimum of two complaints must be filed at the same time for OFCC
consideration; individual complaints are sent to the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. b) OFCC staff may choose to ignore discrimination
that occurred before some arbitrary date. The limit was set at two years in
the UCSD cases even though faculty are usually reviewed every three years
and the process itself can take more than a year. c) the Labor Department is
severely understaffed and long delays are to be expected. In spite of appeals
to their Congresspersons the UCSD faculty memers waited well over two
years before any action was taken.
Third, the Department of Labor staff (at least those in San Diego)
appeared more accustomed to working with factory and office workers and
had little knowledge of how professors are reviewed for merit increases,
promotions, or tenure. They did not know how to compare the files of the
complainants with those of white male professors who had received better
treatment and had no funds to hire a faculty member from another
university as a consultant. One of the UCSD complainants ultimately gave
the OFCC a 12-page memo detailing how promotion and tenure cases are
handled, how secrecy allows behind-the-scenes manipulations and how the
obscure reasons given for denial make challenges nearly impossible. In
addition, a professor walked OFCC staff members through one file to help
prepare them for negotiating with the University's lawyers.
Fourth, the OFCC is asked to handle a great many cases and every
small success is seen as a victory for the Department of Labor, even though
it is not necessarily viewed this way by the complainants. In the UCSD
cases Labor Department negotiators accepted modest settlements for three
faculty members (far from equivalent to their losses) while two almost
identical cases were dropped. The rationale of the OFCC was that
settlement for some was better than settlement for none.
Fifth , (and this should come as no surprise) the University is highly
averse to negative publicity about discrimination against long-term
employees. They would prefer to concentrate on hiring discrimination
problems which carry far less stigma. At UCSD 28 complaints from persons
who said their applications for staff positions were not considered because
of race or sex were combined with the five long-term faculty complaints
for purposes of negotiation. This allowed the University to focus on persons
never hired rather than those who had suffered long-term discrimination.
Several of the rejected job applicants received lump sum settlements as
large or larger than those given to professors who had suffered years of
discrimination while in the University's employ. Equally important, the
University featured these staff settlements in press releases on the
discrimination settlements, ignoring the faculty cases almost entirely.
The lessons of this experience should be clear.
-wage@wage.org-