#1 – Eliminating Barriers In Recruitment and Hiring - The EEOC ’ s focus relative to this priority is to address discriminatory recruiting and hiring practices that target racial, ethic, and religious groups, older workers, women, and people with disabilities. This year ’ s priority had updated goals relative to the use of technology, including artificial intelligence, job advertisements that exclude certain protected groups, segregating individuals into specific job duties or categories based on protected characteristics, policies and practices that limit access to on the job-training, policies that limit employees exclusively to temporary work, restrictive application processes, and screen tools that disproportionately impact workers on a protected-category basis. The Commission also emphasized the underrepresentation of women and workers of color in certain industries and sectors (including construction and manufacturing, high tech, STEM, and finance). According to the EEOC, addressing this priority typically involves strategic litigation with pattern or practice cases. #2 – Protecting Vulnerable Workers – The EEOC ’ s priority here is to combat policies and practices directed against “vulnerable workers,” such as immigrants and migrant workers, and those historically underserved by federal employment discrimination protections. The EEOC’s focus on protecting vulnerable workers involves harassment, retaliation, job segregation, labor trafficking, discriminatory pay, disparate working conditions, and other policies and practices that impact “particularly vulnerable workers and persons from underserved communities.” #3 – Addressing Selected Emerging And Developing Issues – This priority focuses on pushing the legal envelope on the contours of employment discrimination laws and establishing new legal precedents. The EEOC seeks to heighten its focus on employment decisions, practices, or policies in which covered entities’ use of technology contributes to discrimination based on a protected-characteristic. #4 – Advancing Equal Pay For All Workers – While the EEOC ’ s primary focus has been combating pay discrimination based on sex, the Commission also endeavors to address unequal pay based on gender and pay discrimination based on any protected status, including race, ethnicity, age, and disability. The EEOC’s enforcement goals also highlight pay practices that contribute to disparities and may lead to violations of statutes the Commission enforces, such as secrecy policies, discouraging or prohibiting workers from asking about compensation or sharing their pay with co-workers, and reliance on past salary history or applicant’s salary expectations to set pay. #5 – Preserving Access To The Legal System – The Commission ’ s focus with this priority is on practices that discourage or prohibit individuals from exercising their rights, including overly broad waivers, releases, and mandatory arbitration provisions, failure to maintain applicant and employee data, and retaliatory practices that dissuade employees from exercising their rights. Most often, this priority manifests itself with lawsuits grounded on retaliation theories. #6 – Preventing and Remedying Systemic Harassment – This priority is directed at recognizing harassment, both in-person and online, as the EEOC’s charge statistics detail that harassment remains a serious issue in workplaces. The Commission’s enforcement efforts on this front aim to combat systemic harassment in all forms and on all bases. Some – but certainly not all – of the EEOC ’ s lawsuits initiated over the past year fall into one or more of these six categories. Further, while the Commission ’ s six major enforcement priorities have remained consistent across its iterations of the SEP, the EEOC has changed how it interprets those priorities. In effect, this has led the Commission to shift how it approaches litigation and the issues it chooses to litigate in the courts. The 2024-2028 SEP shift in focus to technology is impactful and demonstrates the possibility of targeting advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, in employment processes. The factors underlying many of these enforcement priorities are “systemic cases.” Briefly, systemic cases are those with a strategic impact, insofar as they affect how the law influences a particular community, entity, or industry. As described in previous coverage on the 2017-2022 SEP, which recognized the importance of “systemic” cases to its overall mission, the EEOC is uniform in its devotion of resources and personnel to this type of litigation.
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© Duane Morris LLP 2025
EEOC Litigation Review - 2025
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