We recently went to Niagra Falls where I read a Canadian newspaper article on racial discrimination in Washington, D.C. This followed a conversation I had with an old friend in Turkey. The friend pointed out the hypocrisy of American policy. He claimed the US reviews Turkey annually for potential human rights violations. Reading about the large number of unarmed black people killed after encountering police on minor violations, he suggested Turkey review the US for human rights violations. He suggested we are hypocritical.
Incidents closer to home revealed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has not had a black professional supervisor in the 75 year history of the office. The claim is that no blacks were qualified. This seems incongruous with the fact that lawyers leaving the agency after lack of promotion have risen to VP of one of the nation’s largest manufacturing companies, head of a large legal department for a major health care firm, Administrative judgeship, etc.
Now one could argue the better candidates were selected in the past or that selection was based on performance evaluations. These arguments do not appear valid based on the following:
- One selected supervisor was encouraged to retire and reimburse the government several thousand dollars after it was found that the supervisor took extended lunches to engage in personal recreation, return to the office and take his lunch after his extended lunch hour for many years.
- The same supervisor would sit on reports for several weeks and review them in the afternoon they were due. Then he would return them to the investigator seeking much additional, and often non-relevant, information. This would negatively impact the agents evaluation with respect to timeliness.
- Racially derogatory cartoons were posted on the bulletin board. It was not until a complaint was filed with Washington that the poster was reprimanded.
- A supervisor commented on the lack of mathematical skills by blacks. I wonder how William Phillips, Ph.D., Ronald Mallet, Ph. D, Aziza Baccouche, Ph. D., DeVan Hankerson, Hakeem Oluseyi, Ph.D., and Dione Rossiter, etc. would respond. Ron Mallet has several Ph. D.s including physics and electrical engineering. His experiments in time travel are groundbreaking. What about the black woman heading up the mission to Pluto, or the black mathematician calculation the trajectories of our rockets for space travel.
- Recently, black agents were denied an opportunity to interview for a supervisory position because they did not meet the criteria. Yet when inquiring about criteria, they were denied to know what the criteria were.
- One black agent had achieved the rank of Captain in the U. S. Army, had headed a large governmental agency and supervised several professionals was told that she did not have supervisory skills in spite of past awards and commendations from other agencies.
- None of the selected supervisors knew the 1st two principles of supervision, nor the 5/6 functions of supervision.
- Black agents were consistently denied opportunities afforded white agents for training and inter-agency sabbaticals.
- Supervisors motivate staff by such comments as “I don’t know what you are doing here.” “ You will never succeed.” “You haven’t a clue.” “You made an error, go find it.” As a former division head, I tried to make my staff the best they could be. I tried to make them look forward to coming to work instead of dreading it. I made clear our objectives and counseled when they deviated and even fired them. But they always knew why and the why was work related, fair and impartial.
- Supervisor(s) assigned case to an employee going on vacation due upon return from vacation. Agents told they cannot work on case while on vacation. Remember being late is held against the employee.
There are more instances and the few I have cited are just to show that there is a cause for concern. I have watched a motivate agent go from reading case law at home in the wee hours of the morning to become a better agent, to feeling “What’s the use. It won’t make a difference.”