Outsourcing Threatening Women's Bureau

Established by Congress in 1920, the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau identifies itself as the only federal agency mandated to represent the needs of wage-earning women in public policy-making. The bureau’s mission statement reads simply: “to promote the well being of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”

That President Bush, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and the House Appropriations Committee have proposed funding cuts for the Bureau in addition to the outsourcing of nearly half the bureau’s career positions to private contractors is ironic and all too familiar. According to the American Federation of Government Employees, this transfer of some 85 jobs would allow Bush to sidestep federal labor laws and federal worker unions. The National Council of Women’s Organizations, along with over 200 women’s groups, charge that the effort to outsource jobs at the Women’s Bureau would create a “significant loss of institutional memory” and “send a troubling message about the Department of Labor’s commitment to drawing attention to the experiences of women workers.”

In a letter to the Labor Department, more than 100 Congress members led by U.S. Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (CT-3) and Hilda L. Solis (CA-32) argue that “this latest attempt to downsize the Bureau through the outsourcing of career employees will have a disproportionate negative impact on the work of the Women’s Bureau, and most importantly, on the women workers whose interests the Bureau represents.”

The letter also criticized the Labor Department’s failure to fill Women’s Bureau regional administrators’ posts nationwide. As a result of these vacancies, remaining regional administrators have been responsible for more than one region, and their effective representation of federal interests at the local and state level is diminished.

This, however, is not the first time that the Women’s Bureau has been accused of impropriety. In an April 2004 Salon article, Rebecca Traister addresses a National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) report, entitled Missing: Information about Women’s Lives, which “reveals that the Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women’s Bureau website, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare.” The missing reports contain information and statistics on topics ranging from gender wage differentials to Asian American and Pacific Islander Women in the workplace. Traister says that the fact sheets have been replaced by the more palatable topics “Hot Jobs for the 21st Century” and “20 Leading Occupations for Women.”

NCRW points out what can happen now that a major resource for working women, the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, an agency charged by Congress with giving information on women’s economic status and rights, is nearly silent on the issues formerly acknowledged on the website: “Women lose the tools they need to know their rights in the workplace, advance their careers, and help support their families when helpful publications focused specifically on job rights are no longer available. A look at various public websites indicates that information accumulated over decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations, including a wide variety of helpful fact sheets that analyze women’s status and rights, is no longer available.”

The 2004 report may be predictive of more than the loss of information archives. It may signal the disappearance of the Women’s Bureau itself.

To voice your concerns to Labor Secretary Chao, write to Hon. Elaine Chao, Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20210.

For more information contact Wendy Pollack, director of the Women's Law & Policy Project at 312-263-3830 ext. 238.

Volume 10, Issue 3
September 27, 2006

Funded in part by generous grants from the Chicago Foundation for Women and the Jo & Art Moore Family Fund.

WomanView is published by the Women's Law & Policy Project of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. To subscribe or make a donation, click here. For more information, contact Wendy Pollack at 312.263.3830 x 238. Miriam Beyer wrote this article.