Time To Confront A Useless CHRO
By KAREN LEE TORRE
I know this will not sit well with some colleagues in the employment bar (and certainly not with some state bureaucrats), but I say it is time to eliminate the state's Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO). I have long been a silent critic of this hopelessly inept agency. The necessity of its creation and worthiness of its early years of operation aside, its continued existence decades later has little justification. As a practical matter, I know it is highly improbable that the governor or legislators will move against an agency cloaked with more political hot buttons than any other. Arguing the CHRO is unnecessary will be equated to suggesting we no longer need the state Department of Environmental Protection. Who can be against clean air and water? With CHRO, the rail will be, "Who can be against civil rights?"
The answer is the DEP is actually needed to maintain clean air and water. The CHRO is not only unneeded to protect civil rights but is a useless hurdle that hampers the obtaining of timely and meaningful relief for true victims of civil rights violations and greatly drives up their litigation costs.
For 20 years, I have had to waste time and endure frustrating experiences with this agency which, I am now convinced, is nothing but a repository for make-work jobs and a black hole for taxpayer money. There are good people there mind you, but they have no real mission other than to exist. There are also many less-than-good employees there, some of the laziest and most unproductive beings I have ever encountered. They shuffle paper until it turns brown, pore over union contracts to see how many days they cannot work but still get paid for, and plan for how they will play the gender or race card to forestall or challenge any action to get rid of them.
Most CHRO investigators could not complete a task if you set their pants on fire. They bring to mind my mother's oft-used rebuke to the slow responders and unproductive among her children: "Here's my head, my ass is coming," she'd say, was an attitude that would get our rears in a sting. But there are no consequences to foot and butt dragging by adults at a public bureaucracy like the CHRO — only the usual protections and indulgence afforded to entrenched agency careerists. There are the dedicated and gifted among them, more interested in doing a good job than they are in job security. Their talents are going to waste in a useless bureaucracy with a nice-sounding mission statement but no real mission beyond political necessity.
CHRO staffers, aware that many counseled complaints are filed to meet congressionally-imposed prerequisites to suit, prefer to ignore them until the statutory waiting period passes and the right to sue accrues. Staffers pushed to write investigatory reports whine about what they (rightly) consider an utterly pointless exercise. State statutory remedies for discrimination victims are inferior. Most meritorious complaints are destined for federal court and CHRO staff knows it.
CHRO is now more a venting process for pro ses who think their race or ethnicity gives them the right to be non-performers or no-shows at work. I've defended some of those, privately getting rid of them for nuisance change (it's much cheaper for the vexed employer) only to have CHRO demand I put its name on the deal so it can take the credit for my private effort and bump up their stats. Cases the CHRO had no political interest in were conveniently dismissed as meritless only to have a jury later issue a whopping award.
CHRO was and remains crippled by internal race politics with staffers suing each other and maintaining demographic battle lines. It is Afro-centric, politically correct to a grievous fault and brazenly hostile to the civil rights of white males. It is time to dissolve it or at least gut it with a budget that reflects its worth.•
Karen Lee Torre, a New Haven trial lawyer, litigates civil rights issues in the federal courts. Her e-mail address is thimbleislands@sbcglobal.net.
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