rse discrimination in federal employment comprised 20% of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s caseload. (Discrimination at the Opportunity Commission, 1) The EEOC. The most ironic of cases deals with the EEOC itself. Joseph Ray Terry, a civil rights attorney employed by the Commission won a lawsuit against them in 1996 for unlawful employment discrimination with respect to promotions. Terry claimed that he had been passed over for various promotions over an eight-year time period due to his race and gender (white, male). He was a graduate of the EEOC’s candidate development program that was designed to provide the necessary skills for upper-management positions and was well qualified for all of the positions that he had sought to be promoted. However, these positions repeatedly had been filled by less qualified minorities. The Judge ordered the EEOC to pay Mr. Terry $150,000 in damages, and over $8,000 for stress. The amount ordered in back pay was not disclosed. The EEOC was also ordered to promote him to the position of deputy general counsel for which he had been applying. (Reverse Discrimination Case Against EEOC, 2)According the EEOC’s own 1995 annual report, almost 50% of white-collar jobs within the organization are held by African-Americans, even though they comprise less than 10% of the civilian work force. Additionally, the percentage of Hispanics employed at the EEOC was 200% of the percentage of Hispanics in the civilian work force. “If the EEOC were a private employer, the racial makeup of its workforce would set off alarm bells,” says Clint Bolick, an attorney who worked on the staff of an EEOC commissioner during the eighties and heads the Institute for Justice, a Washington public-interest legal group. (Berleau, 36)The GAO (General Accounting Office). The U.S. General Accounting Office is the audit and investigative arm of Congress. It employs over 2,000 evaluators and...
