Opinion ID: 436108
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: October 1975--May 1978

Text: 69 On December 6, 1974, EEOC served notice of the Commissioner's charge on A & P. At that time, A & P was on notice of its duty to retain personnel records pertinent to [its] treatment of women and members of minority groups. EEOC v. Shell Oil Co., --- U.S. at ----, 104 S.Ct. at 1634 (footnote omitted). Our consideration of any delay occurring thereafter must take into account the fact of such notice and A & P's reaction to it. A & P's initial reaction was to resist the EEOC's investigation. The trial court correctly, therefore, disregarded the delay occurring between December of 1974 and October of 1975, when active resistance to the investigation ceased. 70 The court did, however, hold that the period between October 1975 and May of 1978, when the agency served its Determination of Reasonable Cause, is chargeable to the EEOC and constituted inexcusable delay. Keeping in mind that A & P's affidavits must establish a prima facie defense of laches, we cannot approve that holding. A & P filed five affidavits in support of its motion for summary judgment. None of those affidavits even speaks to the scope of EEOC's investigation, the ease or difficulty with which it might have been accomplished, the condition of A & P's personnel records, or the accessability to EEOC of knowledgeable persons during the investigatory period. Instead, the affidavits primarily address changes which have taken place in A & P's business that may now make A & P's defense of the lawsuit more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Those difficulties, while relevant to the issue of prejudice, are irrelevant to the causes of the delay during the statutory investigation. In addition, most of the changes in A & P's business operations to which they refer took place after A & P was on notice of its duty to retain personnel files until the resolution of the charge. For example, the Mull affidavit alleges that the Philadelphia Bakery went out of business on May 28, 1977. App. at 57. The Varian affidavit alleges that the Office of the Philadelphia Division closed in 1977. App. at 64. Of the store closings listed in the Smith affidavit, the vast majority occurred after notice of the Commissioner's charge. App. at 84-102. Rather than shedding any light on the question why the EEOC investigation might have been more expeditious, they tend to explain why the investigators may have encountered difficulties. Consequently, A & P's affidavits do not establish inordinate delay during the investigatory period. 71 Moreover, the EEOC did file affidavits, which in contrast with those filed by A & P do account for the duration of the investigation. As noted in Part II above, the investigation involved two phases: accumulation of information, and analysis of data and drafting of the Reasonable Cause Determination required by law. 72 The affidavit of William Jordan explains that the accumulation of data required fourteen months. Because A & P kept no records identifying employees by race or sex, thousands of A & P employees had to be interviewed. Employee personnel files were located throughout the country. Some 4000 such files were examined. Often these files were incomplete or inaccurate and required constant checks against other records. On this summary judgment record we must, of course, read the EEOC affidavits in a light most favorable to it. But in fact, as we have already observed, there is really no dispute about the reasons for the duration of the investigation. The A & P affidavits tend, if anything, to confirm the difficulties mentioned in Jordan's affidavit. There is nothing in the record establishing that, given the resources available to the EEOC, the accumulation of data could have been accomplished in less than fourteen months. 73 With respect to the analytical phase of the investigation, Jordan's affidavit explains that the preparation of the Reasonable Cause Determination--itself a document over sixty single-spaced pages in length, addressing some 100 issues--required extensive analyses of over 4000 personnel files containing more than 100,000 pages. We refer in Part II above to the details of that analytical task. There is nothing in the record suggesting that any of the analytical work was unnecessary, that EEOC rejected feasible methods that would have accomplished the task more quickly, or that it had additional resources that could have been set to the task. In the absence of some standard of comparison in the record, it was legal error to conclude that the analytical phase of the investigation and the preparation of the Reasonable Cause Determination should have been accomplished in less time than it took. Indeed, the EEOC's timetable for those tasks compares favorably with the sixteen months that elapsed between filing of the complaint and entry of summary judgment. 74 We note as well that a conclusion that the duration of the investigative period constituted inordinate delay would undermine an important purpose of the Act. That conclusion would inevitably place undue pressure on the Commission to conduct hasty or incomplete investigations and would encourage the Commission to render premature Reasonable Cause Determinations. Those consequences would undermine one of the central purposes of the Act that the Commission's ability to investigate charges of systemic discrimination not be impaired. EEOC v. Shell Oil Co., --- U.S. at ----, 104 S.Ct. at 1630-31. Thus, we hold that the district court's conclusion that the period from October 1975 to May 1978 constituted inexcusable delay was an error of law.