Black D.C. City Workers Advance Civil Rights Claim Over Layoffs

Black former employees of the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency who lost their jobs during a reduction in force offered enough details and data to proceed with their disparate impact discrimination claim against the city, a federal district court said Monday.

The case was originally dismissed by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, but the D.C. Circuit reversed.

Contreras, using the appellate opinion as a guidepost, said this time around the laid off workers identified a particular employment practice and presented sufficient statistical evidence to make out their claim under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

CFSA, after losing over $37 million from its budget, eliminated its social services assistant and social worker associate positions. Of the 115 employees let go, 107 were Black.

The social services agency allegedly didn’t use a uniform process to determine which positions would be eliminated.

Before the RIF, CFSA had 832 workers, 689 of whom were Black. The plaintiffs’ expert testified that the RIF termination rate was 15.5% for Black employees and 5.6% for those of other races.

CFSA’s expert countered that there were actually seven different groups involved in the layoff and that while 107 Black workers were laid off, if each of the seven position groups had been selected in a race-neutral manner, 105.21 Black employees would have been terminated. That result wasn’t statistically significant, he said.

But the workers also showed Black workers comprised 82.8% of all employees before the RIF but 93% of the laid off workers, the court said. The appeal court also previously rejected CFSA’s attempt to analyze the RIF as multiple separate employment practices, it said.

The plaintiffs’ expert adequately supported his conclusion that the process by which CFSA implemented the RIF disproportionately impacted Black workers and that’s sufficient to state a prima facie case of disparate impact, the court said Monday.

Rose Advocate for Civil Rights represented the plaintiffs.

The case is Davis v. D.C., 2020 BL 402302, D.D.C., 10-1564 (RC), 10/19/20.