Worker again files suit against EPA

WASHINGTON -- On a recent balmy Monday, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo walked into a federal courtroom to fight the Environmental Protection Agency.

The two sides argued, not over the environment, but the working environment At issue was whether Coleman-Adebayo should be allowed to continue working out of her suburban home rather than at EPA's downtown offices.

The arguments were heard in a lawsuit Coleman-Adebayo filed against her employer of 14 years. She believes that the EPA has been trying to force her out of her job since she took the agency to court for discrimination six years ago and won a $300,000 judgment. She alleges that the EPA is also retaliating against her for testifying before Congress that the agency targets whistle-blowers and other employees who buck the system.

"My story is the story of so many people in government," said Coleman-Adebayo, a senior policy analyst. "If you file a discrimination complaint, your career is over. What that means is that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a joke in federal cases."

An EPA spokeswoman, Cynthia Bergman, said the agency is transferring Coleman-Adebayo to a position for which she is better suited.

Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said Coleman-Adebayo's discrimination case evolved into a whistle-blower case after she testified against the EPA at congressional hearings in 2000 and 2002.

"There is still widespread hostility toward whistle-blowers" at the agency, Kohn said. "EPA has had a lot of whistle-blower cases that have been found to be valid."

Workers who complain about discrimination in the federal bureaucracy or about retaliation by managers rarely receive public attention. But Coleman-Adebayo's testimony in her 1998 court case and her subsequent activism pushed her into the spotlight.

She testified that a superior referred to her as an "honorary white man" during a 1990 staff meeting and said during a performance evaluation that white co-workers were uncomfortable around her because she was "uppity." She is African-American.

When Coleman-Adebayo, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, was later passed over for a promotion, the same manager mentioned her pregnancy, according to the transcript of her testimony.

"You've just come off maternity leave. . . . I find it difficult to understand how women think they can get pregnant, have children, and still compete with a man," she quoted the manager as saying. The manager disputed her recollection of those conversations.

The jury found in her favor. But according to a 2003 report on EPA management practices by the General Accounting Office, her manager was never disciplined. Coleman-Adebayo said her career went into free fall, and she is fighting to keep her job.

Representatives F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, and Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, rallied behind Coleman-Adebayo, launched an investigation of EPA and other agencies, and pushed a new antidiscrimination law called the No Fear Act through Congress. The bill -- formally the Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act -- was signed by President Bush in 2002.

"If I committed an act that cost taxpayers money, I would pay the price for that at reelection," said Sensenbrenner, a former chairman of the House Science Committee, which monitors the EPA. "The fact that the manager hasn't been disciplined shows that the culture at EPA is to protect their own, even when they're wrong."

The No Fear Act requires agencies to settle discrimination complaints brought by employees out of their general funds. Between 2001 and last year, federal agencies paid $656 million to settle discrimination complaints, according to a report last month by the GAO.

Karen Higginbotham, director of the EPA's Office of Civil Rights, said Sensenbrenner's assertion is unfair. The agency polices discrimination vigorously, she said, and most managers have undergone civil rights training. EPA established a staff last year to intervene in disputes.

As a result, she said, the agency reduced the number of complaints filed by workers from 104 in 2002 to 74 last year, sliced its backlog of cases from 171 to 160, and cut the $1.1 million cost of processing complaints in 2002 by more than half the following year.

Higginbotham also said the EPA is a favored place to work. In a survey of federal employees conducted in 2002 by American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation and the Partnership for Public Service, EPA ranked fifth among 28 federal agencies as one of the best places to work. Minority employees also ranked the EPA in the top five.