#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 update emphasized additional discrimination, bias, and hate directed against religious minorities (including antisemitism and Islamophobia), racial or ethnic groups, and LGBTQI+ individuals. According to the EEOC, addressing this priority typically involves strategic litigation with pattern or practice cases. #2 - Protecting Vulnerable Workers - The EEOC ’ s focus 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. #3 - Addressing Selected Emerging And Developing Issues – The priority focuses on pushing the legal envelope on the contours of employment discrimination laws and establishing new legal precedents. #4 - Ensuring Equal Pay Protections 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. #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. More often than not, this priority manifests itself with lawsuits grounded on retaliation theories. #6 - Preventing And Remedying Systemic Harassment - This priority is directed the Commission’s continued focus on combatting systemic harassment in all forms and on all bases. The EEOC noted that individual claims could also be in this group if they relate to a widespread pattern or practice of harassment. 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 lead 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. Underlying many of these enforcement priorities is “systemic cases.” Systemic cases are those with a strategic impact, insofar as they affect how the law influences a particular community, entity, or industry.
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© Duane Morris LLP 2024
The EEOC Litigation Review – 2024
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