Federal Employment and Labor Law Blog

Last year, the average time a federal employee waited for a resolution of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint was 543 days. The reasons include a large backlog, a shortage of funding, perhaps a lack of leadership -- and the #MeToo movement, which has prompted a flood of new complaints to the agency.

The EEOC operates on two parallel paths. One is for private-sector employees, who are waiting about 295 days, on average, for their complaints to be resolved. The other is for federal employees, who make initial complaints to their own agencies' equal employment office, which conducts its own investigation. Depending on the result of that investigation, the employee could file a lawsuit against their agency -- or they could ask for a hearing with an EEOC administrative law judge (ALJ).

U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty (D - Conn.) has apologized for her failure to protect female staffers who claim to have been threatened and harassed by her former chief of staff. She has also abrogated a nondisclosure agreement signed as part of his termination.

Esty says she was "horrified and angry" in 2016 to learn that the man had allegedly harassed and physically harmed a staff member. One female staffer has reported being punched in the back and also receiving death threats from the man. At the time, Esty demanded the chief obtain counseling. An internal review later led her to conclude that the incident was part of a pattern of behavior.

"I think a cleaning is in order here," former Dick Cheney advisor David Wurmser allegedly wrote in a recent email chain. The chain, which was apparently between current White House and State Department political appointees and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, included messages from Wurmser.

"I hear Tillerson actually has been reasonably good on stuff like this and cleaning house, but there are so many that it boggles the mind," Wurmser added.

When the Navy began integrating submarines eight years ago, there was push-back. Some submariners, veterans and submariners' wives thought the living quarters were just too tight and that lack of privacy and the potential for romantic entanglements would be disruptive.

Today, with a fifth of submarine crews integrated by gender, it appears those concerns were overblown. There was a major incident in 2015, when a group of male submariners were court-martialed for secretly taping women on the USS Wyoming as they were undressing.