It's a story worthy of the Onion--or maybe Lewis Carroll. The Washington Post reports that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with overseeing the fair labor practices of American employers, has been forcing its employees to accept compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, in violation of its own regulations--and the law. This
. . . comes at a time when the agency is handling what it terms an "unprecedented" level of discrimination charges. The EEOC received more than 95,400 charges of job bias in the private sector in fiscal 2008, up 15.2 percent from 2007 and 26 percent from 2006.
EEOC officials and the union representing its employees (hey, is that the same union that represents union workers in their grievance against SEIU?) blame this sorry state of affairs on eight years of Bush administration neglect, when the agency "lost about 25 percent of its staff, including investigators and lawyers who handle the cases . . . and hiring was often at a standstill." They're hoping for improvements under the Obama administration. In the meantime, the president's gonna get their cars fixed.
