Norton Says Retiring EEOC Chair Burdened by Bush Policies and Neglect - August 15, 2006

Norton Says Retiring EEOC Chair Burdened
by Bush Policies and Neglect
August 15, 2006

Washington, DC--Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), a former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), issued the following statement on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) concerning the resignation of EEOC Chair Cari Dominguez at the end of her five year term.

"Chair Cari Dominguez is a moderate Republican, who played the hand she was dealt by the administration she served with intelligence and a degree of balance too seldom seen in some of her predecessors or in others who speak for her party on the sensitive mandate of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We recognize that Chair Dominguez could not have been expected to go much beyond the stated views of the President who appointed her. She deserves considerable credit for an approach that was open and balanced in the important sense that she did not use, when the opportunity presented, the Commission's mandate for political purposes. Her work at the Commission was not tinged with the polarizing policies and views of some of her predecessors and of others in her party on employment discrimination, affirmative action and other necessary racial matters that remain controversial in our country. We appreciate her responsiveness to the Congressional Black Caucus when we questioned the Commission's work.

"However, Chair Dominguez was a victim of the administration of which she was a part. For much of her term, Chair Dominguez has had to put great energy into keeping the agency open and functioning rather than moving as aggressively ahead as we believe is required on the remaining discrimination affecting people of color, women, and disabled people.

"As she entered office, Chair Dominguez found the agency so under-funded that she had to scramble to avoid an unprecedented 30-day furlough for all employees, an almost unheard of predicament for the federal government. Only funding provided by Congress as a part of a mid-year defense supplemental avoided an abrupt shutdown of a vital federal agency. However, this catastrophe was only the beginning for the Chair. For his entire time in office, President Bush has shunned the agency and its mission, as the hiring freeze since 2001 and the loss of 20 percent of EEOC's workforce painfully show. Just last year, in order to avoid layoffs, Commissioner Dominguez had to cut the number of offices and services to many areas of the country. This year, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) and I sponsored an amendment that has kept a National Customer Service Call Center from becoming permanent. Perhaps it was to be expected that under the Bush administration, the Commission would concentrate on individual complaints rather than on aggressively pursuing affirmative action with Commission-initiated complaints addressed to the systemic practices of the worst offenders. Consequently, workers and their lawyers, not the Commission, most often have had to initiate court suits. To her credit, under Cari Dominguez, the agency later filed to become a part of several major, successful law suits initiated by individual employees, bringing to bear the credibility of the federal government as the statute intends. We wish Chair Dominguez well and thank her for her service."