The U.S.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a federal agency whose goal is ending employment discrimination. The EEOC investigates discrimination complaints based on an individual's race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability and retaliation for reporting and/or opposing a discriminatory practice. The Commission is also tasked with filing suits on behalf of alleged victim(s) of discrimination against employers and as an adjudicatory for claims of discrimination brought against federal agencies.
The EEOC's mandate is specified under Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964; the
Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, as amended, 29 U.S.C. 621 et seq. (ADEA); the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973; and the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the
ADA Amendments Act of 2008. It was established on July 2, 1965, exactly one year after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, under the chairmanship of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., an appointee of President
Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The Acting Chair of the Commission is
Stuart J. Ishimaru, who was designated by President
Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. Mr. Ishimaru has been a Commissioner since 2003, and is serving a second term that expires July 1, 2012.
On February 2, 2009, EEOC General Counsel Ronald S. Cooper announced his return to private practice.
Staffing, workload, and backlog
In 1975, when backlog reached more than 100,000 charges to be investigated, President
Gerald Ford's full requested budget of $62 million was approved.
A "Backlog Unit" was created in 1978 in
Philadelphia to resolve the thousands of federal equal employment complaints inherited from the
Civil Service Commission.
EEOC, the Departments of Labor and Justice, the Civil Service Commission and the
Office of Revenue Sharing adopted
Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP).
As of December 2005, full-time staffing of the EEOC has decreased from 2,899 in fiscal year 2001 to 2,343. The commission's budget has increased slightly in that period, from $317 million in fiscal year 2001 to $327 million in fiscal year 2006.
The agency logged over 79,000 complaints in fiscal year 2004 and more than 75,000 in fiscal year 2005. The backlog of complaints rose from 33,562 in 2005 to 39,061 in 2006 (as of June). The number of complaints to investigate grew to 95,400 in fiscal 2008, up 15.2 percent from 2007 and 26 percent from 2006.
Complaints against agency
In March 2009, an arbitrator ruled that the EEOC had itself been violating the
Fair Labor Standards Act with its own employees, by pressuring employees to work extra hours without extra pay. The agency claimed it had offered workers the choice to take compensatory time off.
[, by Steve Vogel, Washington Post, March 31, 2009; Page A15.]Chairs of the EEOC
- 1966-1967: Stephen N. Shulman
