By Joe Lustig
Joe’s HR and Benefits Blog, January 19, 2017 —
The final stats are in for 2016 and it was a good year for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in obtaining relief for victims of employment discrimination.
For fiscal year, the agency recovered $482 million for victims of discrimination in private, federal and state and local government workplaces. The EEOC says it resolved 97,443 charges.
For the first time the commission include charges of discrimination based on LGBT status. EEOC resolved 1,650 charges and recovered $4.4 million for LGBT individuals who filed sex discrimination charges with the agency in fiscal year 2016.
The EEOC is also getting through its charge backlog at a quicker pace, reducing the workload of pending charges by 3.8 percent to 73,508–the lowest pending charge workload in three years.
And here’s the breakdown of charges in descending order:
– Retaliation: 42,018 (45.9 percent of all charges filed)
– Race: 32,309 (35.3 percent)
– Disability: 28,073 (30.7 percent)
– Sex: 26,934 (29.4 percent)
– Age: 20,857 (22.8 percent)
– National Origin: 9,840 (10.8 percent)
– Religion: 3,825 (4.2 percent)
– Color: 3,102 (3.4 percent)
– Equal Pay Act: 1,075 (1.2 percent)
– Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act: 238 (.3 percent).
Read more about last year’s performance here.
