Say you get turned away from a job at a federally funded construction project and you notice that nobody earning a paycheck there looks like you.
If you are a woman or minority and qualified for the job, you may have a legitimate right to complain to the government.
But getting the government to do its job, to investigate whether your rights were violated, has been no easy task.
The agency that monitors minority hiring on federal contracts, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, has lingered for years in a bureaucratic never-never land.
During the 1980s its budget was slashed, its work force was trimmed and its mandate was barely enforced.
The Clinton administration promises to renew the government’s commitment to the agency, but it faces real challenges.
“The infrastructure is still there, but there clearly are morale problems,” said Shirley Wilcher, who became the agency’s director in February.
Wilcher, a former congressional staffer who wrote one of many critical reports on the agency over the years, vows to restore its energy, hold public hearings and stiffen its regulations.
The agency “is a horror,” said Herbert Hill, professor of industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a classic example of the administrative nullification of civil rights laws and executive orders.”
From 1,400 workers in 1978, the agency’s ranks dropped to 690 in 1982, and it rebounded to only 820 today.
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And as its staff dropped, so did its work.
During the Reagan-Bush years, when minority job-hiring goals were unpopular, the agency’s job performance was heavily criticized by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General, its independent investigative arm.
The agency typically took half a year to process complaints in 1988, and some complaints lingered untouched for more than a year, the inspector general reported in 1988.
In the 1970s, the agency set out to enforce a series of local plans across the country for construction unions to boost the number of women and minority workers. Chicago had such a plan.
By the 1980s, however, the plans evaporated.
They were overcome, say agency officials, by the unions’ inertia and the agency’s own problems.
Whatever progress has been achieved for female and construction workers has been “minimal,” Wilcher said.
Female workers in 1970, for example, accounted for 1.2 percent of all construction jobs. Twenty years later, they could claim only 2.8 percent of the jobs, say agency officials.
Besides overseeing minority hiring for more than 250,000 federal contractors, the agency’s load got even heavier in the last few years.
It now helps enforce the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and carries out reviews for the Glass Ceiling Commission on discrimination against women workers.
At the agency’s Chicago office, the problems are stacked up.
Daniel Araiza, the regional director for compliance programs, would like to know what federal construction projects are taking place and who’s working on them. But the government doesn’t have the money to develop that kind of information.
As it is, he has a lot of doubts about the information on file. He would like to know, for example, which contractors are filing their reports.
With so many questions about the data, not much enforcement action is possible. No contractor in the Chicago area has ever been barred from working on federal contracts, and in the 18 months Araiza has been there, no contractor has even been formally warned about non-compliance.
“It’s such a big challenge. There are so many problems in Chicago,” he said.