Published on November 9, 2017
New York — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won nearly $500 million for workers in fiscal year 2017 and reduced its inventory of unresolved discrimination charges to its lowest level in a decade, the agency said Thursday, giving a sampling of data from a report due out next week.
The agency said it won $484 million in the last fiscal year. It also resolved 99,109 charges to bring its total charge workload down to 61,621 at the end of September, compared with resolving 97,443 charges to bring its workload down to 73,508 charges at the same time last year, it said.
EEOC acting chair Victoria Lipnic said in a statement Thursday the agency made “addressing the backlog a priority.”
“The pending inventory of private sector charges … has been a longstanding issue for the EEOC and the public it serves,” Lipnic said.
Lipnic added the agency reduced its backlog in part by sharing effective case resolution strategies among its offices “while ensuring we are capturing charges with merit.”
The $484 million total includes $355.6 million secured for private sector and state workers through mediation, conciliation and other administrative enforcement and another $42.4 million secured through litigation. The agency also won $86 million for federal employees and job applicants, it said.
The agency fielded 540,000 phone calls and more than 155,000 contacts with its field offices in fiscal year 2017, with 84,254 new charges filed. It did not break these charges down into types of discrimination alleged on Thursday.
It filed 184 lawsuits in fiscal year 2017, more than double the 86 suits it filed in the same period a year ago, according to a January release. Of those, 124 included individual claims, 30 alleged non-systemic discrimination against multiple individuals and 30 alleged systemic discrimination. The suits include allegations that workers at a California Chipotle locked a coworker in a freezer after he reported their boss for sexual harassment, and that Time Warner Cable violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by firing an account executive with cancer.
On the outreach front, the agency said its educational programs reached 317,000 people across more than 4,000 free events in fiscal year 2017.
The agency also revamped its online offerings, updating a youth-oriented area of its website, launching a resource center aimed at educating small business owners on their legal responsibilities, and rolling out a new online charge reporting system.
The EEOC announced in March that it would start taking initial inquiries and requests for intake interviews online in five cities. The agency rolled the program out nationwide earlier this month, with Lipnic saying at the time she hoped it would “make the EEOC much more accessible to the public.”
The agency said Thursday it will release additional data in its fiscal year 2017 Performance and Accountability Report, which will be available on its website on Nov. 15. The agency will release comprehensive statistics for fiscal year 2017 in January.
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