Once again this year, retaliation was No. 1 on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s hit parade.
The agency released its year-end numbers this week, and, as expected, it was a record campaign.
The agency took in an all-time high 99,947 charges of employment discrimination and obtained $455.6 million in relief for complainants.
The agency filed 300 lawsuits, resulting in $91 million in payments to complainants. The EEOC also pointed out its continuing commitment to fighting “systemic litigation” — 23 of the lawsuits filed involved systemic allegations involving large numbers of people.
The top two claims:
- Retaliation — 37,334 claims (37.4% of the total), and
- Race discrimination — 35,395 (35.4%).
The agency also received 25,742 complaints of disability discrimination and 23,465 claims of age bias. Both those categories were up over the previous year.
According to a press release, ADA enforcement efforts produced the highest increase in monetary relief among all of the statutes — $103.4 million, about a 36% jump over the previous year’s $76.1 million.
For the first full fiscal year of enforcement, the EEOC received 245 charges under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of genetic information. So far, none of these charges has proceeded to litigation, the agency said.
