New EEOC Chair Jenny Yang (NYU ‘96

On Setember 1, 2014, President Barack Obama named Jenny Yang Chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A 1996 graduate of NYU Law School, she has devoted her career to enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in the workplace. She has experience working in government, the private sector, and non-profit organizations.

Q: What has your road to the EEOC been like?

Although I have spent my career in a variety of settings in the private, government, and nonprofit sectors, my focus has been the same— to advance fairness and equality in the workplace. After graduating from NYU School of Law and completing a clerkship, I worked at the National Employment Law Project through a NYU Community Service Scholarship Fund. There, I assisted garment workers in addressing some of the persistent problems they faced, such as overtime violations and repetitive stress injuries. By working to understand the root causes of these challenges, we identified strategies, including impact litigation, public education, and policy initiatives, to address the systemic problems in the industry. After that, I made my way to Washington D.C., where I worked as a Senior Jenny Yang, Chair of EEOC Trial Attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division for about five years. I had the opportunity to develop my investigative and litigation skills, working on individual and pattern or practice cases to enforce Title VII in state and local government workplaces. I then spent a decade in private practice, as partner of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. I represented employees across the country in complex civil rights and employment actions. I saw how vital private enforcement is to fulfilling the promise of our civil rights laws. As chair of the firm's hiring and diversity committee, I also gained an important perspective on the challenges employers confront in making hiring and other personnel decisions. Each of these past work experiences has provided a valuable perspective for me at the EEOC. What I have found most rewarding about our agency’s work is to see the impact our guidance, enforcement, and education efforts have in promoting greater compliance. Most employers aspire to comply with our anti-discrimination laws. The more information we can provide on how to interpret and apply the law, as well as identify best practices, the more we can encourage employers to prevent discrimination from occurring.

Q: Was making your way to the EEOC always your goal, or did it change throughout the course of your career?

Throughout my career I have seen the pivotal role that the EEOC plays in the enforcement of our antidiscrimination laws, but I did not necessarily set out to join the EEOC. In private practice, I filed charges with the EEOC on behalf of my clients and also worked alongside the agency in related cases. At DOJ, I litigated charges against public employers that the EEOC had investigated and referred to us. Although I did not have any master plan on where I thought I’d end up, now that I am here at the EEOC, I can’t imagine a place I’d rather be.

Q: How does your role at the EEOC compare to what you thought the role would be?

I now have the responsibility for the operation of the entire agency. One of my priorities for our own workplace is to ensure that we are a model employer. We know that as the EEOC, we must walk the walk and not just talk the talk. We are not only the agency charged with enforcing the nation’s anti-discrimination laws, but we are also an employer to over 2,200 people located in 53 offices around the country. It is a priority for me to ensure that we are recognizing the contributions of our people and ensuring opportunities for training, advancement, and meaningful work. One of my most important jobs is communicating. That includes fostering communication internally so that we can better collaborate for greater impact in achieving our common mission. The people who make up This agency have tremendous insight into how we can continue to do our work better, and to make our own

workplace better. A key takeaway is understanding how vital it is to open the lines of communication across our agency, to truly listen to employees and then implement these ideas. It is also critical for us to strengthen our external communication so that we share our work with those in the public we serve and hear from those in the employer and worker communities about the issues that are most important to them. We are taking advantage of social media to do this, and I’ve launched a series of Chair messages on our public website and Facebook page, the first of which focused on the importance of our mediation and conciliation efforts.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish during your tenure as Chair of the EEOC?

This is a historic year for us as we celebrate our 50th Anniversary this July. This is the time to re-imagine how we work to ensure that the EEOC: 1) expands our impact to achieve justice and equality; and 2) meets the needs of the public we serve. Let me tell you what that means for us: We know that our work is not done. To expand our impact, we are leveraging our resources and engaging more workplaces across America in preventing discrimination. Strengthening EEOC’s systemic program is a key part of this effort. Today, EEOC’s systemic work is more important than ever before. Our task now is to redouble our efforts by strengthening our infrastructure to ensure our systemic work is vigorous, impactful, and coordinated around the country. Our 50th Anniversary is also the time for a call to action – to engage more people of all backgrounds in our efforts. All too often, any discussion about race or discrimination makes people uncomfortable, so we avoid the conversation. But, at the EEOC, our job is to tackle these issues head on. We know from our work across the country that discrimination continues to exist in many forms, both egregious and more subtle. The events in Ferguson, Missouri, New York, and many other communities have brought national attention to the tensions that remain. We must find a way to engage our nation in a constructive and productive conversation about race and discrimination. Only then, can we begin to confront the stubbornly persistent challenge of discrimination today. Our work around harassment is one example of our efforts to engage a broader group of people in our efforts to prevent and remedy discrimination. This one issue is alleged in 30% of our charges and in many of our federal sector complaints. Last month, at a public EEOC meeting on harassment, I launched a task force, co-chaired by Commissioners Chai Feldblum and Victoria Lipnic, to convene employers, workers’ advocates, and academics to identify effective strategies to prevent and remedy harassment in the workplace. My second goal is for the EEOC to better serve the public, including by being more timely and responsive to the public’s needs. We are investing in technology to streamline and automate services to the public. This includes systems that will allow employees and employers to check the status of charges online, to schedule intake appointments electronically, and transform our current paper system into a digital charge system, which will free up investigator time on what matters most, which is developing their investigations. We are also working to ensure timely investigation of charges. We have an important statutory obligation to accept every charge for filing and investigation; yet, we must decide the level of investigation and enforcement and make these decisions as quickly as possible. These decisions are guided by the facts and the issues raised in the charge and the potential impact of the enforcement action.

Q: Who have your mentors been?

I've had several mentors in my career, and I’ll share key lessons learned from two of them. Our former EEOC Commissioner and Acting Chair, Stuart Ishimaru, is one of them. From him, I have learned that sometimes you need to be prepared to fight to stand up for the principles that are most important, but often your greatest success will come from working to persuade and inspire others to act. Another important mentor is my former partner, Joseph M. Sellers, at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. From Joe I learned that you can’t be afraid to dream big. Of course, it’s also essential to ground yourself in reality, so plan your ideal strategy, as well as several backup plans to ensure you accomplish as many of your goals as possible. Even when the going may get tough, he remains a relentless optimist. That hope is what keeps you seeing your way forward toward continued progress even in the face of daunting challenges.

Steven Greenhouse (NYU ‘82):

Life at, and after, The New York Times

Steven Greenhouse was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. The NYU Labor Center has asked me to write a few words about my departure from The New York Times, where I had worked as a reporter for 31 years. I loved working at the Times, and I loved the labor and workplace beat, which I had for 19 years. But when the Times offered a generous buyout, I, with considerable ambivalence, decided to take the buyout and leave the NYT last December. I am a famed workaholic, and I felt this gave me an opportunity to slow down. Also, I had two good journalist friends who died of cancer last year – like me, they were 63 – and I thought, it might be good to get off the very rapid merry-go-round that is life at the Times. I had worked as a newspaper reporter for three and a half years before attending NYU Law School. Before going to NYU, I had decided to leave journalism because newspapers were a crazy, poorly run industry, and I had always been attracted to the law. (Back in 1974, I had been accepted to both Columbia Journalism School and NYU Law, and at that time, I decided Steven Greenhouse (NYU ‘82), former to attend the former). While at NYU Law, as much as I liked the law, I real New York Times reporter ized that the practice of journalism was generally more fun – and at least to me, more existentially fulfilling – than the practice of law. So when an editor I knew at the Times offered me a reporting job after law school, I leapt at the chance. I had always dreamt of working at the Times. I well remember Professor Estreicher voicing regret that I was forsaking law for journalism, but he said I could easily return to the law so long as I did so within two years. But I loved the Times, and within five years, I was in the Paris bureau as European economics correspondent. Being a reporter in Paris was another lifelong dream. I covered everything from the Velvet Revolution in Prague to what it takes to become a three-star Michelin restaurant to the transformation of Russia and Poland to capitalism. After five years in Paris, I served in the NYT’s Washington bureau, where I covered the State Department and diplomacy. That was exciting and grueling, and I got more than my share of front-page stories, but I missed writing flesh-and-blood stories about people. When I heard that the labor beat was available, I applied for it -even though some friends told me that labor was dying and that I’d be an idiot to take such an unsexy beat. I told those friends that there were more than 100 million people working in the U.S., and if I couldn’t find a ton of meaty, compelling stories on that beat, then there’s something wrong with me. I began the labor beat in late 1995, writing about miserable housing conditions for farmworkers, Walmart’s locking in workers at night, the labor movement’s struggles to reverse its decline, the inexcusable deaths of 1,129 workers in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh – and about a Dominican immigrant in Brooklyn who worked 11 hours a day for $33 a day. I covered corruption in the Teamsters, and I wrote about employers that brazenly broke the law to beat back unionization drives. I also wrote about exemplary employers like Costco and Patagonia that treated their workers like grown-ups, like prized assets, paying them well and providing excellent benefits While I toiled on the labor beat, my two wonderful children, Emily and Jeremy, kept telling me, “Daddy, you have to write a book.” Oh, the wisdom of children. I felt that I had developed such a vast, on-the-ground knowledge of the American workplace that I should indeed do a book, and I wrote “The Big Squeeze, Tough