Chicago employees of federal contractor oversight agency put on paid leave: ‘It's open season out there for all these contractors'

Chicago Tribune

18-04-2025

The Chicago staffers of the U.S. Department of Labor's federal contractor oversight agency were put on paid administrative leave this week, along with workers in most other regions of the country.
The staffers put on paid leave are employees of the agency's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which investigates federal contractors to ensure they comply with nondiscrimination laws.
Employees in the OFCCP's national enforcement branch and staff throughout five of the agency's six regions were notified they were being placed on paid administrative leave, according to a Wednesday email to staff from OFCCP director Catherine Eschbach, who was appointed to the role at the end of March. Bloomberg Law first reported on the email, which the Tribune reviewed.
Brent Barron, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 648, which represents OFCCP employees in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin, estimated that 20 to 25 Chicago-based employees of the agency are affected, around a dozen of whom are in the union's bargaining unit. Most of those workers had already agreed to take early retirement or deferred resignation offers that would have ended their time on the job Friday, Barron said.
Those put on paid leave include investigators, clerical employees and regional office staff, Barron said.
'Their primary function was to go out and investigate the contractors and their hiring practices to make sure that when they hired somebody… they weren't discriminating against anybody,' Barron said.
Now, Barron said, there is no one left in the Midwest to perform that work.
'It's open season out there for all these contractors,' he said.
The Wednesday email said employees were being placed on leave 'pending further compliance' with an executive order from President Donald Trump that significantly reduced the scope of the agency's work. That executive order, titled 'Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,' rescinded the 1965 executive order from former President Lyndon B. Johnson that established much of the agency's authority to oversee federal contractors.
'This agency now has a significantly reduced scope of mission,' Eschbach wrote in the Wednesday email. 'This action is consistent with the iterative process to 'right-size' and optimize the agency, consistent with its current statutory functions.'
Staffers in the agency's Southwest and Rocky Mountain region and in certain branches of the Washington D.C. office were not impacted, according to the email.
Neither the labor department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.