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Eliminate Useless CHRO

By KAREN LEE TORRE

I have before stated my view that the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities is an obsolete and utterly useless agency that perpetuates imaginary discrimination to keep itself on public life support. A bill I did not think would gain traction in the legislature has received much attention of late in the employment bar.

House Bill 5206, sponsored by the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, would give people the right to take an employment discrimination complaint to Superior Court rather than the CHRO. A version of it recently passed the House Labor and Public Employees Committee but it was so watered down that it is as useless as the CHRO.

The substitute language would allow a complainant to opt out of the CHRO process at any time and request a release from the agency instead of having to wait 210 days, as current law requires. The CHRO must promptly issue the release, but it can defer acting on the request for 30 days if the executive director believes the complaint may be resolved within that period. Scrap the bill. Scrap the CHRO instead.

According to the joint favorable report of the House Labor and Public Employees Committee, there is an odd line-up of support and opposition to the bill. The trial lawyers association supported the original bill, asserting it would save employees and employers time and money. It most assuredly would.

As one should expect, the CHRO opposes it. So does AFSCME Council 4, the union that represents state employees; it insists “the CHRO process works,” a laughable assertion. (Of course the CHRO process works – it works to sustain the make-work jobs of union members). AFSCME also claimed that eliminating the mandatory agency filing requirements would lead to higher costs for taxpayers. Is that the new math? AFSCME Local 2663’s statement is even funnier. It claimed the bill would “circumvent a highly effective principle of administrative law.” And what principle is that? The one that has Connecticut and other states on the verge of bankruptcy because Democrats and other liberals can’t stop spending money we don’t have and funding their special interests at our expense?

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association is, surprisingly, opposed the bill. It evidently fears that losing the CHRO as a gatekeeper will yield more frivolous lawsuits against employers. That fear is unfounded. Keeping the CHRO in any form is a financial burden on Connecticut employers, a cost that most business leaders do not realize is actually shouldered by their employees.

Here is an example of CHRO’s make-work practices. If you bring an action in federal court on behalf of, say, 10 plaintiffs, all asserting the same claim against the same employer, must you file 10 separate lawsuits? Of course not. That is unnecessary, costly and inefficient.

But the CHRO forces lawyers to file a separate complaint for each claimant. And the complaint is not the only thing a lawyer must prepare 10 times over with 10 individual executions. The whole packet of bureaucratic forms must be duplicated for each employee. Separate docket numbers for each. Consequently, you must file 10 separate corresponding federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges. What a waste.

And this burden extends to the employer that must file an answer to each complaint and further submit detailed answers and documentation in response to bureaucratic, cumbersome, questionnaires for each individual, identical complaint. For what? To give some make-work employee at the CHRO paper to push.

Another feature of the CHRO is its generous and unproductive employee work schedules. I remember getting steamed one time during a fact-finding investigation when we were told we’d have to come back on another day to finish up, even though it was mid-afternoon and we were but two hours away from concluding the evidence. The investigator had one of those democratic work schedules that allowed her to skip out in mid-afternoon to attend to one of her kids. I was forced to schlep to Waterbury again. Thousands more in fees on both sides because a normal work day is anathema to liberals.

I say eliminate this useless and taxpayer-sucking agency. Take its entire budgetary allotment and give it to legal aid agencies where the money is desperately needed and will not go to waste. •

Karen Lee Torre, a New Haven trial lawyer, litigates civil rights issues in the federal courts. Her e-mail address is thimbleislands@sbcglobal.net.