Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele has been trying to win over African American voters on the campaign trail, although a complaint from a long-time county employee says he isn’t abiding by a federal court order to address the county’s historic racially discriminatory hiring practices.
Certified nursing assistant Doris Ellison has worked at the county since 1990 and she was one of the last workers on the first shift tending to the patients at the long-term care unit at the county’s mental health hospital. Abele’s Behavioral Health Division (BHD) shut down that unit at the end of 2015 and has placed its patients into the community.
Ellison applied for a comparable first shift position at another unit within the hospital. But she was only offered a part-time position and a third-shift position. She began working third shift on Feb. 1.
Ellison is saying her treatment violates a 1980 federal order, which attempted to remedy the county’s racist hiring policies, and she’s filing a lawsuit to force Abele’s administration to comply with the order. Ellison was part of the class action lawsuit which argued that African Americans who applied for county jobs during the 1970s such as Ellison were victims of racial discrimination. The federal judge agreed and changed the dates of the affected county workers to when they applied for jobs and faced discrimination.
For Ellison, that backdating pushes her hiring date for seniority purposes to 1979, when she had applied for a job and faced racial discrimination. That makes her the most senior staffer at BHD. Nevertheless, Ellison didn’t get her desired first-shift full-time position when she applied for it multiple times last year. Then, when BHD closed its long-term care unit, she was offered a part-time position, and then a third-shift full-time position, which she accepted but argues is unfair and violates the 1980 court order.
“A federal court required Milwaukee County to make reparations to African American employees that were discriminated against throughout the 1970s,” said Dennis Hughes of AFSCME Council 32, which represents Ellison. “Chris Abele has attempted to rescind that award, but no politician has the power to undo a federal consent decree, not even the son of a billionaire.”
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Abele’s been trying to win the support of African Americans but has had a checkered record in office. Last fall, when questioned by Supervisor Khalif Rainey about how his proposed budget benefits African American Milwaukeeans, Abele responded that he was supporting the House of Corrections, child support services and mental health programs. Perhaps to generate some positive headlines, Abele signed on to Rainey’s proposed Office of African American Affairs. But Abele didn’t consult with Rainey and missed the deadline for forming the office. When his top aide finally pitched the office to county supervisors earlier this month, Abele’s proposal shifted oversight of the office from the independently elected comptroller, as the supervisors required, to his own office. Supervisors sent Abele’s plan back to committee for review.
You can see why supervisors are skeptical about letting Abele control the proposed Office of African American Affairs. The office would likely be interested in Ellison’s complaint and other employees who are similarly affected by the federal order. But if Abele were to take control of the office, you can bet that it wouldn’t look too closely at Abele’s own attempts to ignore a federal order to remedy the county’s historically racist hiring practices.
