Punching In: EEOC Charges Spike as Fiscal Year Comes to a Close

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.

EEOC Ramps Up End of Year Litigation|DOL Looks at International Child Labor Chain

Riddhi Setty: The end of the fiscal year marks an annual flurry of litigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The commission said in a statement late last week that preliminary data indicates it had filed 143 new employment discrimination lawsuits total in fiscal year 2023, a jump of more than 50% over 2022.

A Bloomberg Law review of EEOC website announcements on new complaint filings shows a great number of those suits came in the last few weeks as the fiscal year drew to a close, and a potential government shutdown loomed on the horizon. The commission chooses to formally announce many—but not necessarily all—of the complaints it files in court on its site.

From Sept. 14 through 28 alone, the EEOC filed 36 cases, constituting the bulk of the 46 the agency brought over the month of September through the 28th, according to the review. The number is a marked increase from August, during which the EEOC only posted it had filed 12 suits.

Those numbers are consistent with an uptick in filings the EEOC announced in 2022, when there were 40 lawsuits filed in September compared to nine in August, Bloomberg Law’s review showed.

Among the recent lawsuits are several against multi-national retailer Walmart. The EEOC has posted about filing eight lawsuits in calendar year 2023 against the company, nearly half of which were announced in the past month. All but one of those cases allege disability discrimination.

The EEOC’s recent litigation also marks the agency’s first-ever lawsuits filed against companies over a failure to grant employees religious exemptions to Covid-19 vaccine policies, indicating that there may be an increase in such lawsuits following the Supreme Court’s Groff v. DeJoy decision in June. The agency filed a pair of lawsuits in mid-September claiming that Hank’s Furniture and United Healthcare Services Inc. didn’t accommodate their employees’ sincerely held beliefs because they refused to let them opt out of the vaccines.

Tracking the EEOC’s own self-reported jump in filings in the 2023 fiscal year, Bloomberg Law’s review found 108 new complaint filings announced on the commission’s site this calendar year through Sept. 28 . This contrasts with the total of 76 lawsuits that the EEOC publicly announced in all of 2022.

The agency also resolves many disputes through pre-litigation conciliation, and inks numerous settlement agreements. One of its most notable publicly disclosed settlements in 2023 resolved its first-ever AI-based hiring discrimination case against a company that allegedly programmed its recruitment software to automatically reject older applicants.

READ MORE:

• EEOC Backs Christian Worker Who Rejected Covid Shot in New Suit
• United Healthcare Sued for Denying Covid Vax Religious Exemption
• EEOC Settles First-of-Its-Kind AI Bias in Hiring Lawsuit (1)

Thea Mei Lee, deputy undersecretary of international affairs at the US Department of Labor, speaks at a trade and labor dialogue during the US-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in College Park, Md., on Dec. 5, 2022.

Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rebecca Rainey: As countries increasingly grapple with a growing trend of children working in dangerous conditions across the world, the US Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs says gaps in enforcement are likely making the problem worse.

The office released its annual “Worst Forms of Child Labor” report Sept. 26 analyzing 131 countries’ and territories’ child labor practices, finding that 90% violate international child labor standards in at least one area.

For example, the report identified 35 countries where the minimum age for work “is also lower than the compulsory education age, which may encourage children to drop out of school before completing their compulsory education.”

Roughly 160 million children worked in “unacceptable” forms of labor in 2020—the latest data available—an increase of 8 million children since 2016, according to estimates from the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Those numbers have likely grown following the pandemic, Thea Lee, DOL’s deputy undersecretary for International Affairs said in an interview with PI. “We see that there really is a gap in labor, enforcement and honestly, we see that in the United States as well as around the world,” she said.

Lee noted that the several high profile child labor cases that have occurred in the US over the past several months, like when the DOL uncovered more than 100 children working overnight cleaning shifts at meatpacking plants, underscore how dire the situation is globally.

“Even in a wealthy country like the United States, we struggle to have enough enforcement resources,” Lee said, “and if you can imagine how hard that is in the United States, imagine how hard it might be in the Democratic Republic of Congo or other countries that don’t have the level of development that we have.”

The goal of ILAB’s annual child labor report is to help inform American businesses and workers where child labor could be undercutting competition in the global economy, according to Lee.

“The terms of competition in the global economy affect everybody, whether you are producing and selling in the United States of America, if you are investing abroad or if you are importing from abroad,” she said. The push toward decarbonization, for example, presents a particular challenge, given that many of the supply chains to make green energy are “tainted with child labor,” she added.

Looking forward, Lee said that the office is funding several technical assistance projects focused on tracing goods that are made with inputs produced by child labor throughout global supply chains to ensure children aren’t involved in the production of any piece of a final product.

“We don’t want our consumer actions to be supporting companies that might be profiting from child labor,” Lee said.

We’re punching out. Daily Labor Report subscribers, please check in for updates during the week, and feel free to reach out to us.