The EEOC has lost right to claim that it's for "equal employment opportunity. ". The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to investigate workplace discrimination. Yet, on August 18, it signed a settlement promising never to do that again, for ...
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The EEOC has lost the plot

The EEOC has lost right to claim that it's for "equal employment opportunity."

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to investigate workplace discrimination. Yet, on August 18, it signed a settlement promising never to do that again, for one group of employers, forever.

The employer is the Christian Employers Alliance. CEA sued the EEOC challenging its guidance treating gender identity discrimination as sex discrimination under Title VII. Instead of litigating it, the agency gave CEA everything it asked for.

The settlement bars the EEOC from ever pursuing a gender identity discrimination claim against a CEA member — not just the 20,000-plus employers already in the group, but any future member too, as long as they belonged when the discrimination allegedly happened. No expiration date. No court monitoring for compliance. Just permanent immunity from investigation.

CEA is already selling it that way. Its membership page reads "Join CEA and stop being exposed," under a banner promising members are "Protected the Moment You're In." Karla Gilbride, EEOC general counsel under the Biden administration and now at the ACLU, named it for what it is: "It's like they're selling an insurance policy against EEOC investigations."

The EEOC, however, already has a real process for religious objections: a case-by-case defense the agency weighs against the facts. This settlement skips that. Investigators can't open a file at all if the employer is a member. Gilbride called that carve-out "unprecedented." It creates a license for these employers to discriminate against a class of their employees. That should trouble everyone, no matter your religion or beliefs.

So what do you actually take from this settlement?

1. Membership isn't immunity from the courthouse. This blocks EEOC charges and investigations. It does nothing to a state discrimination claim or an employee's own lawsuit under Bostock, the Supreme Court precedent that defines transgender discrimination as sex discrimination. The case doesn't vanish — it shows up somewhere else, just without the EEOC doing the legwork for the plaintiff.

2. An association card is not a compliance policy. If "we joined this group" is your entire defense, you're betting on a settlement surviving a legal challenge to whether an agency can even do this.

3. Agency policy isn't law, and it turns over. This policy and the settlement it furthers exists because of who runs the EEOC right now. It remains to be seen if this settlement will survive future administrations or legal scrutiny.

The EEOC is supposed to police discrimination, not pre-clear it for a membership fee. When the enforcer starts selling exemptions from itself, it isn't just picking a side. It's forgetting the job it was hired to do. Call that religious liberty if you want. Just don't call it equal.

The 8th nominee for the Worst Employer of 2026 is … The Passport Pilferer

An agricultural labor contractor recruited five Guatemalan farmworkers under the H-2A visa program, charged them an illegal $2,500 annual fee to work, confiscated their passports, and threatened to have them deported if they complained. 

A federal jury didn't buy the defense. Neither did the 6th Circuit.

Purpose Point Harvesting and its owners, Milton and Lucille Gomez, employed Luis Gomez-Echeverria, Hervil Gomez-Echeverria, Darwin Joel Fuentes Perez, Artemio Coronado Esteban, and Leonel Lopez y Lopez, Guatemalan citizens with work visas for temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs, for the 2017 through 2019 growing seasons. The $2,500 annual recruitment fee — illegal under the H-2A program — amounted to more than a year's wages in Guatemala, forcing the workers to take out high-interest loans just to show up for the job.

It got worse from there.

Workers logged 19-hour days that never showed up on their paychecks, because records documenting their hours were destroyed.

They lived in small trailers, sleeping on couches instead of in beds.

Milton confiscated their passports and Social Security cards (a federal crime) and Lucille made herself an authorized user on workers' bank accounts without their knowledge, at one point withdrawing $2,500 from a worker's account herself.

When one worker needed medical care for an infected hand injury, he waited two weeks and ultimately needed surgery.

When workers tried to leave, Milton posted on Facebook that they were missing, and reported one to police as a missing person rather than to the Department of Labor, as the law required.

The jury found the defendants liable under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the FLSA, and Michigan wage and trafficking law, awarding $105,000 in compensatory damages and $450,000 in punitive damages — a figure the 6th Circuit called "rather modest" given the conduct and the TVPRA's own 20-year, $500,000 criminal exposure. It's hard to argue with that assessment.

If your business model depends on illegal fees, confiscated documents, and the threat of deportation to keep people quiet, the punitive damages ratio was never going to be your problem. Your misconduct was. That's why Purpose Point Harvesting earned its nomination for the Worst Employer of 2026.

Hiring isn't a numbers game. It's a standards game.

Hiring is quality control. The moment you treat it as a numbers problem, you've already made your first bad hire.

The FBI is about to learn that lesson.

The bureau is short-staffed. It lost more than 1,100 special agents in 2025 alone, leaving the FBI with a significant staffing shortage. Its solution was to rewrite its hiring disqualification rules.

Under a June 16 internal memo reported by CBS News, applicants who admit to hiring prostitutes can now still be considered — as long as it happened fewer than three times and at least a decade ago. Applicants who stole from a former employer are in the clear if the theft is more than three years old. And applicants with a history of bestiality or animal cruelty are now eligible if the conduct occurred before they turned 18 — with no distinction, per CBS's sources, between an applicant who willingly engaged in the conduct and one who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

As recently as 2023, the FBI's own published guidance listed prostitution and bestiality among its automatic disqualifiers. That guidance is gone.

FBI Director Kash Patel insists this isn't a lowering of the bar. He's said the bureau is "not reducing our standards" and is instead "making it harder" to get hired, pointing to record application numbers as proof the pipeline is healthy.

Application volume, however, is not a quality metric.

No matter your industry or the composition of your workforce, a pile of resumes doesn't tell you anything about who you're actually about to hire. Loosening your disqualification criteria to keep the applicant count up isn't recruiting strategy. It's an admission that you can't attract enough qualified people under your real standards, so you moved the standards instead.

The mechanics look different outside federal law enforcement, but the tradeoff is identical. You relax a drug testing policy because you can't fill warehouse shifts. You skip the background check because the applicant pool is thin. You stop verifying references because it slows down time-to-hire.

Every one of those decisions feels like a staffing fix. None of them are. They're liability you're creating on purpose, in real time, because you decided quantity mattered more than quality.

The candidates who get past a lowered bar don't disappear once your building is full. They are now your workforce, and because of their shortcomings, your potential problems and liabilities. In the FBI's case, they become agents carrying federal authority and firearms. In your case, they become the employee HR can't fix and the lawsuit you should have seen coming but didn't.
      

WIRTW #808 (the 'document, document, document' edition)

Earlier this week I appeared on a webinar hosted by SelectSoftware Reviews and sponsored by Insperity, on protecting your business through the employee lifecycle. We covered hiring, onboarding, performance management, and termination.

One theme kept surfacing, hour after hour, question after question.

Documentation.


By the end of the hour, it wasn't just a talking point. It was the takeaway.

If it's not written down, it didn't happen.

I don't mean that as a cute aphorism. I mean it as a description of how litigation actually works. Judges and juries don't care what you remember. They don't care what you meant to do, what you're sure you said, or what "everyone knew" about an employee's performance. They care about what you can show them.

Testimony is cheap. Anyone can take the stand and swear that Employee X was warned three times before termination. But without a written warning, a performance improvement plan, an email, text, or Slack message, a note in the file — something — that testimony is just a lawyer's client saying what a lawyer's client needs to say. Opposing counsel knows it. The jury knows it. And your credibility takes the hit.

This is Personnel File 101, but employers still get it wrong constantly:
  • Managers give verbal counseling and never memorialize it.
  • Performance issues live in a manager's head, not in a review.
  • Terminations get built on a paper trail assembled after the decision, not before it.

That last one is its own special problem. Contemporaneous documentation, created in the ordinary course of business at or near the time of the event, is powerful evidence. Documentation manufactured after an EEOC charge lands or a lawsuit gets filed looks exactly like what it is — and plaintiffs' lawyers love pointing that out to a jury.

Employers, train your managers and supervisors to build the habit of writing it down when it happens, not when you need it. The write-up doesn't need to be a legal masterpiece. It just needs to exist.

Because in a courtroom, the absence of a document isn't neutral. It's evidence too — just not the kind you want.

You can watch the entire webinar here.


Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

Five Employment Law Lessons from Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" — via California Employment Law


The Law Firm Scandal Every Manager Needs to Pay Attention to Right Now — via Improve Your HR by Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady

How to Spot a Toxic Leader—Before Hiring Them — via Harvard Business Review





99.9% of Germs Eliminated. Also Her ADA Claims. — via Eric Meyer's Employer Handbook Blog


Why employers shouldn't mine employees' social media accounts

A federal judge just told Southwest Airlines what it can't look at on Facebook.

The court entered a permanent injunction barring Southwest from "proactively searching for, relying on, or using" Charlene Carter's religious statements — including her posts about abortion — in any future discipline, discharge, or other adverse action.

Here's the backstory. Southwest fired Carter after she sent her union president graphic anti-abortion images and video. She sued both Southwest and the union under Title VII for religious discrimination. In 2022, a jury awarded her $5 million (later reduced to $800,000), finding that employer and union discriminated and retaliated against her for her religious views. The 5th Circuit sent the trial court's injunction back down as overbroad. This is the judge's narrowed version.

Employers think that Title VII protects only their conduct, not their curiosity. It doesn't work that way.

Employees generally have no 1st Amendment rights against a private employer policing their off-duty speech. I've written that sentence in posts more times than I can count. But Title VII doesn't ask whether an employee had a free speech right. It asks whether a protected characteristic — here, religion — tainted the employer's motive for taking action.

Seeking out Carter's religious posts and then using them against her isn't a speech violation. It's evidence of discriminatory intent under Title VII. That's the entire ballgame, and it's why the injunction targets the searching and relying on, not just the disciplining.

Employers, here are your cues from this injunction:

1. Don't go looking for an employee's posts about religion, health information or disabilities, or any other protected characteristic to build a disciplinary file.

2. If a post lands in your lap unsolicited, document why you're acting (or not acting) independent of the protected content.

3. A pattern of "we only checked her page" is Exhibit A in every failure-to-treat-similarly-situated-employees argument your plaintiff's counsel will make. It will also make that much harder to argue to a judge or jury that you didn't rely on the information that you found.

Employees don't have 1st Amendment free speech rights to enforce against you. But you still need a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for looking — and then for using what you find.

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