The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is supposed to enforce civil rights laws in the United States and regularly files lawsuits against private firms for discrimination based on age, race, sex and other factors. Now, however, the EEOC is being sued by several lawyers who claimed they were illegally forced out of their jobs so that they could be replaced with workers who were younger and of different races.
The accusations center around attorney William Snapp who was the regional attorney for the EEOC office in Atlanta, Georgia. Snapp, who is currently suing the EEOC, claims that in October 1998 his boss ordered him to get rid of two older lawyers and replace them with younger lawyers to increase the office’s productivity.
Rather than comply with what he thought was an illegal order, Snapp tried to boost office productivity through more traditional means. Based on the criteria used to evaluate EEOC office at the time — the number of cases brought to trial — Snapp’s Atlanta office was among the most productive in the country. But then the EEOC changed its evaluation practices from looking at cases that went to trial to evaluating offices based on the number cases they had filed.
Snapp maintains that EEOC used the new standard as a pretext to institute mandatory transfers of older lawyers — a practice Snapp maintains was commonly used to harass older employees into retiring.
Snapp’s attorney also suggests that along with his refusal to go along with the transfers of older employees, race may have played a part in Snapp’s own eventual demotion. The EEOC replaced Snapp with an black attorney who has so far been unable to pass the bar exam in Georgia and thus isn’t even able to practice law in the state where he is supposed to be overseeing civil rights lawsuits.
Aside from the rank hypocrisy of a government agency that regularly files discrimination complaints against private employers possibly engaging in discrimination itself, Snapp’s claims confirm conservative/libertarian suspicions that the EEOC files discrimination lawsuits based not necessarily on any sort of objective standards, but rather simply to fill quotas.
Snapp claims that at the end of 1998 his superiors told him that since the productivity of his office would henceforth be based on the number of lawsuits filed, the EEOC office in Atlanta should increase its level of litigation “without regard to the quality of the cases filed.” Snapp maintains that a supervisor told him to begin filing more “garbage” lawsuits saying, “You can afford it. The quality of your current cases is pretty good. You should see some of the ‘garbage’ that other offices have filed.”
Source:
EEOC accused of age bias. R. Robin McDonald, Fulton County Daily, March 2, 2001.