Introduction Equal Employment Opportunity is the state that exists when all employees in any given occupation can go as far as their ability and willingness to accept challenge will take them. Accepting as true that roughly the same percent of minorities and women are talented as that of any other group, the state of Equal Employment Opportunity will be demonstrated to exist in the Depart ment of Labor when minorities and women are distributed in the same manner as all employees and in numbers which reflect the percent they comprise of the population or workforce. Investigation by the Task Force clearly illustrates that the Department has not established an effective equal employment opportunity program to achieve this state. The investigation included (1) a statistical evaluation of the status of minorities and women in the Department of Labor; (2) interviews with EEO and Personnel staff and employees at various levels; (3) in-depth studies of Recruitment and Upward Mobility programs; and (4) a review of the present EEO organizational structure. The simple quantitative analysis and the correlation study showed substantial underutilization of minorities and women in the Department. Such factors as education, length of service and time-in-grade were examined. A small part of underutilization can be attributed to these factors, but our analysis shows that the major portion of underutilization is due to race and sex. Examination of recruitment policies throughout the Department revealed that negligible efforts were being made in the area of minority and female recruitment. The unfortunate results of these minimal efforts, evident in all A&O's, are most notable with regards to entry level women in OSHA & OASA and entry level blacks in OSHA & BLS. Furthermore, availability studies indicate that there are women and minorities for DOL jobs both within and outside of the Department. Three departmental upward mobility programs have affected only 45 out of 3500 nonprofessional employees over the past five years. The Manpower Administration has the only one of these programs which comes close to following the Civil Service Guidelines for upward mobility. The organization of EEO in the Department is frag mented and not placed at a sufficiently high level to have Department-wide influence. As a result, the A&Os have de veloped many different EEO policies with varying degrees of success. The Department of Labor must attempt to establish an effective EEO program. Departmental programs and policies are concerned with the workingman, minorities and the disadvantaged, and the Department is responsible for enforcing EEO standards among government contractors, State employment agencies, and agency-funded programs. The Department must make the same requirements of itself as it does of others in order to have credibility while carrying out its responsibilities. Recent disturbances at HUD and HEW, agencies with constituencies similar to the Department of Labor's, indicate that the internal EEO status of a government agency does affect its community stature and efforts. Appropriate action must be taken by the Department to avoid similar confrontations. An effective EEO program would result in the |