Thousands of current and former employees at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland are about to get a $22.7 million payday after a nearly 20-year battle.
Maceo Nesmith Jr. thought he deserved a promotion while working for the Social Security Administration (SSA). But when he looked around him at headquarters in the late 2000s, he noticed a lack of Black men in supervisory roles, a factor he saw as leading some of those men to retire or leave the office entirely. So he filed a complaint against his employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
“I was determined that I wasn’t going to leave the office, which is why I filed my complaint,” said Nesmith, who is 59 and still works at SSA headquarters as an accountant.
Nesmith’s complaint was rolled into a class action lawsuit in 2007. While the complaint originally focused on discrimination against Black men at headquarters both in terms of promotions and performance-based monetary awards, the promotions portion was eventually dropped.
On May 13, the EEOC approved a settlement agreement for $22.7 million. According to the decision, the class eligible for compensation includes “all African-American male employees at the GS-14 level and below at the Agency’s headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, excluding employees in the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (now the Office of Hearing Operations) and field employees, for the time period of April 7, 2003 to the effective date of the settlement agreement.”
That covers about 3,000 former and current employees, said Jeremy Wright, an attorney with the D.C.-based Kator, Parks, Weiser & Wright law firm that is representing the class.
Wright said the case centered on the agency’s annual bonus payment system, which the complaint said disfavored Black men both in terms of the number of awards that were given out and the amount of each granted award, allegations the firm backed with statistical analysis.
Esset Tate Jr., one of the class leaders, said SSA employees could receive performance awards in the form of either a bonus cash payment or a permanent pay increase. Management decided who got either form of award, Tate said.
“I was not getting them at the same rate based on my performance,” Tate, who retired in 2018 and now lives in Tampa Bay, Florida, said of the awards. “And then in talking with the class members, Black males, I felt it was happening throughout the agency at headquarters, and that’s why I joined in to lead the class.”
Tate, 63, started at SSA as an intern and held about 15 distinct jobs at the agency throughout his over 30-year career, he said. A graduate of Morgan State University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, Tate felt that from the beginning, he wasn’t able to advance at the same pace as colleagues who weren’t Black men.
In an emailed statement, the SSA said its awards policies “prohibit discrimination and require merit-based recognition consistent with equal employment opportunity principles.”
“While we maintain that our awards policies did not have a disparate impact as alleged, the settlement of these claims reflects the parties’ good faith efforts to resolve the litigation and advance common goals of fairness,” the statement reads.
The case settlement also requires the Social Security Administration to collect and analyze demographic data related to the awards it gives out over the next two fiscal years. The agency must submit those findings to an expert to determine whether “statistically significant disparities exist in the payment of Performance Awards.”
“The settlement provides for this settlement fund to be allotted to the victims of discrimination to make up for the harm they suffered for the past 20 years,” Wright said. “It also guarantees, we hope, that the agency will take measures to correct the system and avoid any discrimination going forward.”
In 2002, the agency announced a $7.7 million settlement for a complaint brought by Gilbert Jefferson and two other SSA employees that was filed in 1995. That complaint covered 2,200 Black men who worked at headquarters and may have been denied promotions and raises dating back to 1987, according to a report in The Baltimore Sun.
By the time Tate filed his own complaint in 2006, “nothing had really changed,” he said. Meanwhile, Nesmith hopes it will be different this time.
“This is the second settlement we’ve had with African American males, so it shows that even with the one filed in the 90s, the problem still exists and persists,” Nesmith said. “I believe some people are like, ‘This is the second lawsuit. We need to stop what we’re doing, we need to change what we’re doing.’”
Wright said because the agency failed to honor its settlement and root out discrimination in the Jefferson case, that case is still pending and his firm is handling it.
The SSA said the Jefferson case “remains pending before the EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations. The agency maintains that it engaged in good faith to honor the parties’ agreement.”
Both Nesmith and Tate said the case has taken a personal toll on them. Because Nesmith’s name was linked to the complaint, it hindered his ability to try and find jobs elsewhere, he said, and it affected his ambition and motivation. Tate said he contributed “blood, sweat and tears” over the nearly 20 years it took for the parties to settle, leading to physical, mental and financial tolls.
Although Tate is happy about the redress he and the other class members will receive, as well as for the monitoring of potential structural racism within the SSA, he still wants an apology from the agency for the lack of equity in awards that he and other Black men received over the last two decades.
“We as Black males did not receive those [awards] over 20 years,” Tate said. “[That] didn’t allow us to save, didn’t allow us to invest in a 401(k); who knows what the return may have been. It did not allow us to pay for children’s or grandchildren’s education. It didn’t allow us to travel with our spouse. All of those things were happening for everyone else — it was not happening for the Black males.
“So what I lost personally, I can’t calculate it,” Tate added, “but I know it’s a whole lot.”