The number of workplace sexual harassment cases resolved by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
dropped last year (from 7,758 to 7,037), as did the amount of compensation received by victims of sexual harassment. The numbers marked a third straight year of declines in resolutions. Meanwhile, the backlog of the total number of EEOC charges—which includes harassment and discrimination cases—increased by a little
over seven percent last year. Why? Bryce Covert has
the explanation.
In short: the budget games Congress has been playing over the past few years. And that spells trouble for the victims of harassment.
The EEOC itself points mostly to a shuttered federal government last year. “I think that probably the biggest factor was the government shutdown,” Mindy Weinstein, acting director of the Washington field office, told ThinkProgress. “We were closed for about three weeks at the beginning of the fiscal year, so we definitely lost some time and we weren’t doing all of the things we normally would do.” Even after the agency’s employees returned after the shutdown ended, there was extra work to catch up on, from reviewing documents that had piled up to rescheduling interviews to responding to emails. “I’m sure that there were some lingering effects of it in the weeks and maybe even months that followed,” she added.
But another problem appears to be simply having enough staff to process the claims, according to Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center.
“There is no question that the EEOC doesn’t have the right amount of resources to do its job,” she said. After the automatic budget cuts from sequestration, “their budget has been so cut so much to the bone that after staff, they barely had funds for litigating expenses.”
Naturally, being strapped for resources has forced the EEOC to make choices about where it spends its time and energy because it simply can't get to every claim. That's not likely to change any time soon with a Republican-led Congress that could barely be convinced to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security.