New data from the Congressional Office of Compliance was released Thursday featuring the amount of taxpayer-funded settlements.
In the last couple of months press headlines have been dominated by sexual misconduct and the discrimination of women in entertainment as well as the workplace. Washington hasn’t been immune to the scandal and accusations either. From Roy Moore to former Senator Al Franken and even President Trump are all staring down the barrel from their accusers. As per a recent tweet by Elana Schor, she posted pictures of the newly released data.
https://twitter.com/eschor/status/943996098015846401
The anonymous data set did feature the types of settlements included not only sex discrimination, but race discrimination, age discrimination and disability discrimination as well. The Senate Rules and Appropriations Committees recently made publicly available the two decades of data from the Congressional Office of Compliance (OOC) (where lawmakers and staffers file workplace claims) on the settlements from 1997 to 2017. The data details the amount paid from a Treasury Department fund for discrimination suits against Senator’s offices not to mention their non-member Senate offices too.
According to the numbers 13 settlements involving Senator’s offices totaled $599,252.47 in taxpayer money, while the 10 settlements involving non-member Senate offices totaled in at $853,225, with one race discrimination cost of $421,225 making up a shockingly near half of that sum.
As Ali Rogan of ABC News reported:
“It is not clear that any of the Senate employer discrimination settlements are related to sexual harassment. “They only list ‘sex discrimination’ because, for an unspecified amount of time, OOC did not separate out sexual harassment from other sex/gender-related issues.”
