1976 Three years after the Committee brought suit alleging racial and ethnic employment discrimination by the Chicago Police Department, Judge Prentice Marshall finds intentional discrimination, permanently enjoins the Chicago Police Department from hiring and promoting employees from the challenged officers' and sergeants' eligibility lists, and imposes hiring quotas for Blacks, Latinos, and women.
1979 In response to the overwhelming number of requests for assistance with employment discrimination cases, the Committee opens a loan program designed to defray costs and provide technical assistance to private attorneys taking on Title VII cases, and to increase access to the courts. Over two years, 37 cases are filed, and the project ends with a Title VII Litigation Seminar attended by over 100 lawyers.
1981 The Committee begins working on projects to address discrimination against people with disabilities. Projects are developed in the virtually untested areas of housing and public accommodations, as well as employment, to establish strong standards for the new Illinois Human Rights Act prohibitions.
1982 The City settles the nine-year-old N.O.W. v. City of Chicago equal pay case, benefitting hundreds of women janitresses and women clerks through salary upgrades, retroactive pension benefits, and $4.5 million in back pay.
1983 Damages of more than $500,000 are awarded to the leaders and members of the Afro-American Patrolmen's League to compensate for police harassment during the pendency of their suit charging systemic racial discrimination.
1990 In Rochon v. FBI, the Committee joins in the suit against the FBI, the Department of Justice, and individual FBI agents for extreme, prolonged racial harassment, including death threats. Counsel seek to have Edwin Meese, Bradford Reynolds, and the entire Civil Right Division of the Justice Department disqualified from participation in the grand jury.
1992 Filed in 1973, this race, national origin, and sex employment discrimination case, brought against the Chicago Police Department, is finally resolved as hundreds of officers receive their long overdue back pay and are given their proper seniority rights.
1996 Working as part of the steering committee of the state-wide Coalition for Equal Opportunity, the Committee successfully organizes opposition to proposed legislation to abolish affirmative action in Illinois.
1998 The Chicago Lawyers' Committee files Lewis, et al. v. City of Chicago, a class action alleging that a written examination policy - under which only persons who scored 89 or above were allowed to continue on in the hiring process and take the other primary pre-employment test, a physical agility examination - had a disparate impact against African Americans, and did not measure the skills which are important for firefighting. In 2005 the United States District Court held that the Fire Department test had arbitrarily excluded 6,500 African Americans from firefighter positions.
2000 Under a U.S. E.E.O.C. mediation program, charging parties and employers engage in voluntary efforts to settle charges of employment discrimination without litigation. Because defendants frequently have counsel, the Chicago Lawyers Committee represents claimants at mediation, securing thousands of dollars in compensation for victims of discrimination, plus reinstatements, accommodations for disabilities, favorable references and other relief.
2001 The Committee files a class action on behalf of approximately seventy women who worked at a regional car dealership, when the management unleashed a campaign of sexual harassment on its female workers and refused to provide its workers, many of whom were low-wage, temporary employees, with information on their right to protest the harassment. The settlement terms include treating the temporary workers as employees entitled to sexual harassment protection.
2003 The Chicago Lawyers' Committee was retained by five client groups composed of minority and women contractors to represent their interests in maintaining the Minority and Women Business Enterprise programs operated by the City of Chicago. In 2003, the trial Judge agrees that discrimination continues to impede equal access to construction opportunities in Chicago, creating a compelling interest for the City to address these obstacles. The Judge gives the City six months to try race and gender neutral programs to address credit market discrimination, lower the graduation requirement, create a sunset provision for the program, and develop a wealth test.
2004 In Ralphs Grocery Co. v. Doris Martinez and the Illinois Department of Human Rights, a nationwide employer with a policy forbidding employees from filing charges of discrimination with state investigative agencies, files an injunction action against an employee to compel her to withdraw her disability discrimination charge from IDHR and arbitrate the investigation. Lawyers successfully prevent the employer from obtaining any preliminary injunctive relief, and obtained a judicial determination that a mandatory arbitration agreement cannot preclude an employee from filing a discrimination charge.
2005 The Committee wins liability in the Lewis case. In this case the Committee represents over 6500 African Americans who passed the 1995 entry level firefighter test, but were not considered for hire. In March 2005 the trial judge found that the 1995 written firefighters entrance exam had a disparate impact on African Americans but that the exam did not predict which applicants would make the best firefighters.
The Illinois Attorney General appointed the project director of the Employment Opportunity Project to the position of Special Assistant Attorney General, to lead a team of government lawyers in defending the State of Illinois' public contracting program from constitutional attack. During a two-week federal court trial, the trial team argued that the contracting program, administered by the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), must allocate a small percentage of road construction projects to businesses owned by minorities and women as a remedy for historical discrimination against such firms. In 2005, the US District Court rules that IDOT's plan is narrowly tailored to the goal of remedying the effects of racial and gender discrimination within the construction industry.
2006 The Committee files a class racial/ethnic harassment case against Ceisel Masonry, a local brick masonry firm, alleging that foremen regularly subjected Latino workers to a barrage of racial and ethnic abuse.