The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 on Tuesday to strip federal employees of their right to a hearing when they file a discrimination complaint. The agency whose one job is to hear you when your boss discriminates against you just voted to stop hearing you. Chair Andrea Lucas called the complaint process “susceptible to abuse.” The abuse she’s referring to is federal workers — prison guards who got groped, FBI agents who got passed over for being the wrong color — asking for their case to be heard by an actual judge. That’s the abuse. People using the system the way it was designed.
They also killed class action complaints. If fifty women at the same federal prison are all being harassed by the same supervisor, they now each have to file individually, exhaust every step of the process alone, and then try to band together in federal court. That’s not streamlining. That’s making people give up before they get to the door. AFGE sued back in July because Lucas had already frozen every class complaint in the pipeline six months earlier — in December — before the rule even existed. The vote on Tuesday didn’t create the policy. It legalized the one she was already running in secret.
The old system averaged 2.63 years between filing and getting relief. The EEOC’s fix wasn’t to hire more judges or fund the backlog. It was to remove the thing you were waiting for. You’re not stuck in line anymore because the line is gone. Lucas voted yes, Panuccio voted yes, and somewhere in a federal facility a woman who reported her supervisor just learned that the process she was told to trust got ripped out while she was still standing in it. Efficiency.