Court rejects proposed settlement between EEOC and labor union as not in the "public interest"

In our world, if the case settles, then the case is over. Most civil rights cases settle privately and the court will issue an order dismissing the case without analyzing whether the settlement is fair or not. But there are exceptions to this rule. One of them arises in this case, where the EEOC has been in litigation against a labor union for more than 50 years and decided to resolve the case once and for all. The trial court had different ideas, and the settlement is rejected.

The case is EEOC v. Local 580 of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers, a summary order issued on February 12. The Department of Justice sued the union in 1971. That was the Nixon Department of Justice, by the way, which accused the union of racial discrimination in denying employment opportunities to non-white job applicants by excluding them from union membership and refusing to send them out to available jobs. 

A consent decree was eventually put in place but the union violated its terms again and again over the years. But in 2019, after several years of not hearing any complaints of discrimination from Local 580 members, the EEOC decided that continued supervision over the union was no longer warranted. The agency's research showed that only 17% of those union members interviewed said they were victims of racial discrimination. The EEOC also hired an expert who found significant racial disparities with respect to overtime hours, but the expert said these disparities were the fault of employers, not the union. This analysis only focused on 2018-2019, however, as the union had only collected data from 2018 to the present. Based on this evidence, the EEOC moved to end the court/EEOC supervision over the union.

The trial court denied the motion, and the Court of Appeals (Calabresi, Lee and Nathan) agrees that it is still too early to withdraw this supervision over the union. Why? Because it is not "fair and reasonable" under the case law. The court finds the union had consistently ignored court orders to maintain good record keeping regarding critical data about the operation of its referral hall. So we do not have reliable data about how things really work at the union. It is therefore not clear if the proposed consent decree would improve racial disparities among union workers, the entire purpose of the litigation. 

Nor is it in the public interest to withdraw this court/EEOC supervision, the Second Circuit holds, not only because of the faulty record-keeping, and adopting the consent decree might signal to future litigants that disregard for court-ordered obligations will be rewarded.