For two years Jeanette Leino has shuttled between Seattle and Denver to head up Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offices in each city.
Her traveling days may soon be over. Plans call for regional offices in eight cities, including Denver and Seattle, to be downgraded to field offices.
The reorganization still must be approved by a U.S. Senate committee, but if it is, the director’s position that Leino holds in both offices would disappear and she would go to work elsewhere in the agency.
The EEOC handles complaints from workers or job applicants who feel an employer has discriminated against them.
Lawyers say they are concerned that the plan would further erode the effectiveness of an agency they say is already understaffed.
“They are being eviscerated,” said Denver lawyer David Lane. “I have cases currently in the EEOC, and they sit and they sit and they sit.
“My clients come to me with complaints about discrimination in the workplace, and the EEOC is supposed to get out and investigate,” Lane said.
The Denver office is now responsible for federal discrimination complaints from six states and fields about 2,300 complaints a year. The vast majority are from Colorado, and the office decides to litigate only about 10 a year. Roughly 30 percent are sent to mediation, and the rest are found to be without merit, Leino said.
Under the new plan, the office’s domain would shrink to just Colorado and Wyoming, and decisions about which cases to prosecute would be made by a regional attorney based in Phoenix.
Since 1999, the number of claim investigators in the Denver office has dropped from 23 to 16 as employees retired and their positions went unfilled, said Patricia McMahon, program analyst in the EEOC’s Denver office.
Even the director’s job was downsized after the full-time director retired. Leino, who had been a full-time director in Seattle, split her time between the two positions.
There could be further attrition as employees like Leino, who is 57, move on rather than take other jobs in the organization, said David Cashdan, an employment lawyer and board member of the National Employment Lawyers Association.
“The alternative jobs they are talking about won’t appeal to them,” he said.
Leino said the reorganization wouldn’t result in job cuts.
“They can’t cut any jobs at this point because we are so bare-boned that we are scraping under the barrel,” said Gabrielle Martin, an EEOC trial attorney in Denver. She’s also the president of the Government Employees National Council of EEOC Locals Number 216.
The reorganization is meant to provide more service in areas where it is needed and to make the agency more efficient, Leino said.
Small offices would be added in Las Vegas, and Mobile, Ala., cities that are generating more discrimination complaints as a result of population growth and demographic shifts.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
