By Brendan O'Brien
Jan 29 (Reuters) - The Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission received 99,412 discrimination charges last year,
down slightly from a record set in 2011 but still at
historically high levels.
This total represents 32 percent more than the 75,428
charges the agency handled in 2005, the lowest point in the last
decade, the agency said.
Charges are discrimination claims individuals file with the
EEOC. A charge can comprise more than one accusation of
discrimination based on sex, race, religion and age.
The number of EEOC lawsuits, meanwhile, decreased to 122 in
2012 from 261 in 2011, according to data released by the agency.
The agency said on Tuesday that the decrease has been caused
by a concerted effort through its systemic litigation program to
target company policy, cases that impact 20 or more people at a
company or industry-wide practices.
"Systemic cases affect and benefit more discrimination
victims, as well as potentially creating more corrective effects
in the large companies and industries sued," said EEOC
spokesperson James Ryan in a statement.
"However, this emphasis tends to decrease the number of
individual suits the EEOC files."
During the last three years, the EEOC has been fined and
sanctioned by federal judges in a series of cases, causing the
agency to be more cautious in the claims it pursues, said Gerald
Maatman, the co-chair of Seyfarth Shaw's complex discrimination
litigation practice group.
"Federal judges concluded that the government hadn't done
its homework and brought lawsuits it should not have brought
that did not have a factual or legal basis," he said.
A ruling by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case
against CRST Van Expedited also may be causing the case docket
to shrink at the EEOC, he said. The court ruled in favor of the
trucking company, saying the EEOC cannot file a discrimination
lawsuit before finding claimants.
"The confluence of factors in essence depresses the number
of lawsuit filings ... and the EEOC is doing a lot more homework
before it files its lawsuits," said Maatman, who authored the
firm's annual report on EEOC legal activities.
INVESTIGATIONS AND SETTLEMENTS
The number of systemic investigations by the agency went up
fourfold in 2012 while systemic suits accounted for 20 percent
of all active merits suits, according to Maatman's analysis.
The agency completed 240 systemic investigations during
2012, resulting in 46 settlements or conciliation agreements and
the recovery of $36.2 million for victims of unlawful
discrimination. The EEOC also filed 12 systemic lawsuits during
the year.
The number of charges resolved through conciliation, the
last step before litigation, increased by 18 percent over 2011,
according to the agency.
The EEOC also said the most frequently filed charges were
for retaliation (37,836), race (33,512) and sex discrimination
(30,356), which includes charges related to sexual harassment
and pregnancy.
The EEOC's inventory of total charges pending at the end of
2012 shrank by about 10 percent to 70,312. It was the first time
since 2002 the agency reported two consecutive years of
decreasing inventory.
During 2012, EEOC recovered $365.4 million, the most in
agency history, from private and public sector employers through
its administrative process.
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