Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

Employers contemplating a forced transfer of a worker will need to grapple with a new standard set out by the US Supreme Court under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that makes it unlawful to discriminate against workers based on various protected characteristics. The Supreme Court in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis issued an important ruling that clarifies the evidentiary standard employees must meet when asserting a discriminatory transfer claim against an employer under Title VII.   Prior to the Court’s decision, there was a Circuit split with most courts holding that an employee had to show a significant employment disadvantage to prevail on a claim that their transfer violated Title VII.  In its opinion, the Supreme Court held instead that an employee must show (i) the employer’s action was discriminatory, and (ii) that the employee suffered “some harm” respecting an “identifiable term or condition of employment” to state a claim for discrimination under Title VII.  The majority noted that the Court’s “some harm” standard is a downward departure from the type of evidence that lower courts had traditionally required to show discrimination under Title VII – namely, that an employee must suffer “significant,” “material,” or “serious” harm to have an actionable claim. 

On December 6, 2023, the US Supreme Court heard arguments for Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, which may have significant implications for discrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Specifically, the Supreme Court in this case could clarify whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act requires a clear showing of significant disadvantage or tangible harm to have an actionable claim.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) published proposed enforcement guidance for workplace harassment for public comment on October 2, 2023. The proposed guidance can be found on the EEOC’s website. While the EEOC attempted to provide updated harassment guidance under the Trump administration in 2017, final guidance was never issued and if this new guidance is finalized it would represent the first time the EEOC has updated its workplace harassment guidance in nearly a quarter century.

Last week, the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in Sharp v. S&S Activewear, L.L.C. where it confirmed that music in the workplace can form the basis of a Title VII sex harassment claim even when it is (1) not directed at any particular individual employee, and (2) offends both female and male employees.

In Hamilton v. Dallas County, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 223831, 2020 WL 7047055, at *2 (N.D. Tex. Dec. 1, 2020), a federal district court judge dismissed a lawsuit by female Dallas County detention officers alleging that a gender-based decision related to weekend work schedules violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  At the root of that case was the fact that, although male and female officers received the same number of days off during a workweek, only male officers were permitted to take both weekend days off.  The female officers complained about the scheduling policy, but the County maintained the policy, citing safety concerns. 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has started to take affirmative steps to include non-binary classifications on agency forms.  In an announcement last month, individuals will be able to choose a non-binary gender markers when filling out intake and charge of discrimination forms used by workers for discrimination complaints levied against employers.  On these forms, an individual will be able choose “X” for the voluntary self-identification questions and use the prefix “Mx.”

Last week, the EEOC issued new guidance on how to apply anti-discrimination laws to an applicant or employee’s request for a religious exemption from an employer’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement.

On September 24, 2021, the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force (“Task Force”) issued written Guidance to implement Executive Order 14042 (“Ensuring Adequate COVID Safety Protocols for Federal Contractors”), which was signed by President Biden on September 9, 2021.  The Guidance is a key component of President Biden’s larger “Path Out of the Pandemic: COVID-19 Action Plan.”

On June 30, 2021, President Biden signed a joint resolution narrowly passed by Congress to repeal a Trump-era rule that would have increased the EEOC’s information-sharing requirements during the statutorily mandated conciliation process.

Employers remember the seminal Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., where the Court held that Title VII’s “because of sex” protections extend to sexual orientation and transgender status.  (See our previous blog entry.)   Now, on the one-year anniversary of that influential case, the EEOC has issued guidance to clarify whether employers can segregate bathrooms by gender or sex.  That question was conspicuously left unresolved in Bostock.

Since taking office, President Biden has issued Executive Orders covering topics from climate change to mask mandates.  Some of these new Executive Orders are aimed at eliminating discrimination and promoting equity at the federal level.  These directives will likely result in new requirements for private sector companies that are government contractors or subcontractors, and could require them to revise practices and policies in order to keep, or procure new, government contracts.

On November 17, 2020 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) released proposed updates to its Compliance Manual on Religious Discrimination (“Manual”). The draft revisions are available for public input until December 17, 2020, after which the EEOC will consider the public’s input, make any changes, and publish the finalized Manual.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on an employee’s sexual orientation and/or transgendered status.  Though Title VII does not expressly mention “sexual orientation” or “transgender,” the Court held that “homosexuality and transgender status are inextricably bound up with sex” and that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex”—a protected class under Title VII.

Dollar General and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) recently settled a six-year-old Title VII lawsuit.  The EEOC brought its race discrimination claim on behalf of a Charging Party and a class of Black job applicants, alleging that Dollar General’s use of criminal justice history information in the hiring process had a disparate impact on Black applicants.

The body of law surrounding class action employment arbitrations received another jolt Monday when the Second Circuit revived an arbitration action with a potential class of roughly 70,000 employees.

In Jock v. Sterling Jewelers, the Second Circuit overturned the district court and upheld an arbitrator’s decision to bind absent class members to the arbitration provisions of the company’s agreement.  The case represents another significant development in the realm of class arbitrations and class waivers, which have been the subject of significant recent litigation.

The #MeToo movement has placed sexual harassment on the front pages of newspapers, has galvanized some states to reconsider their own sexual harassment laws, and has encouraged employers to take a closer look at their policies and procedures.

With such heightened awareness of sexual harassment, employers may feel an inclination to resolve doubts in favor of the accuser.  A recent Second Circuit decision, however, illustrates a counterweight to this outlook.

After a nearly six-year legal battle, the Fifth Circuit has struck down the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 2012 Enforcement Guidance on the consideration of criminal history in employment decisions.  On August 6, a three-judge panel held that the Guidance was a substantive rule the EEOC had no authority to issue and that the EEOC can no longer enforce the Guidance or treat it as binding in any respect.

In a unanimous 9-0 decision authored by Justice Ginsburg, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved a split amongst the circuit courts of whether filing a charge of discrimination pursuant to Title VII is a jurisdictional prerequisite or a claims-processing rule. Prior to the Supreme Court’s resolution of the issue, the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and D.C. Circuit Courts all held that the administrative exhaustion requirements under Title VII are not jurisdictional, but rather an affirmative defense that can be waived by an employer if not timely raised. On the other side of the circuit split, the Forth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts held that the administrative exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional, and that a federal district court has no authority to adjudicate Title VII claims if the plaintiff has not first filed a charge with the EEOC. In its decision, Fort Bend County v. Davis, all nine justices agreed that the charge filing requirement under Title VII is not jurisdictional, and therefore can be waived by a defendant if not timely raised.

After languishing on the docket for almost a year, the United States Supreme Court agreed today to hear three cases concerning the scope of Title VII’s protections for LGBT employees.  The Court is now set to decide two separate, but related questions: (1) whether Title VII protects against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; and (2) whether Title VII protects against discrimination on the basis of transgendered status.

As we previously reported here, here, and here,  there has been a wave of federal court litigation over the last two years on this topic, with various ...

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to resolve a growing split of authority among lower federal circuit courts regarding the requirement under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”) that individuals must file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC before bringing Title VII claims against their employer. Specifically, the Supreme Court is set to decide the following issue: “Whether Title VII’s administrative-exhaustion requirement is a jurisdictional prerequisite to suit, as three circuits have held, or a waivable claim-processing rule, as eight circuits have held.”

This week the LGBT community and its supporters won an important case in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.  In Zarda v. Altitude Express, the Court ruled that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination extends to same-sex, or “anti-gay,” discrimination.  In that case, Donald Zarda, a gay skydiving instructor, alleged he was unlawfully fired after a customer complained about him disclosing his same-sex orientation.

In a landmark ruling on April 4, 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, sitting en banc, became the first federal appellate court to officially recognize a discrimination claim under Title VII based solely on the plaintiff’s sexual orientation.  The Court’s decision in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana reflects a groundswell of recent cases questioning whether sexual orientation claims are viable under Title VII.  Although the Seventh Circuit is the only appellate court so far to hold that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of “sex” discrimination under Title VII, recent panel decisions from the Second and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals signal that additional circuit courts might be poised to overrule existing case law to find similar protections.

It has been ironclad law since the enactment of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that the Act’s prohibition against discrimination “because of . . . sex” does not include sexual orientation.  Federal law does not prohibit employers from terminating someone for being gay or lesbian.  For now, at least.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (covering Florida, Georgia, and Alabama) confirmed that proposition this month in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital.  On one hand, the court’s holding reinforced what it and every other federal appellate circuit already had determined.  On the other, the court showcased perhaps the most heated internal judiciary battle yet on this issue, which has percolated at high temperatures for the past few years.

Enforcing a race-neutral grooming policy that prohibits employees from wearing dreadlocks is not intentional racial discrimination under Title VII.  That is what the Eleventh Circuit recently held in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, --- F.3d ---, No. 14-13482, 2016 WL 4916851 (11th Cir. Sept. 15, 2016).

On August 29, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued Vasquez v. Empress Ambulance Service, Inc., --- F.3d ---, No. 15-3239-CV, 2016 WL 4501673 (2d Cir. Aug. 29, 2016), holding that an employer may be held liable for a low-level employee’s animus under the cat’s paw theory of liability if the employer’s own negligence allows that animus to result in adverse employment action against another employee.

On March 1, 2016, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) sued employers for the first time for sexual orientation discrimination. The EEOC filed lawsuits in federal courts in Pittsburgh and Baltimore against manufacturing and health care employers for unlawful sex discrimination on behalf of employees alleging they were harassed and discriminated against based on their sexual orientation.

In February of 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) released detailed information and statistics summarizing the charges of discrimination that the agency received throughout its 2015 fiscal year. The EEOC is the administrative agency charged with implementing and enforcing a number of federal anti-discrimination employment statutes, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). Under each of these statutes, employees seeking to bring a claim of unlawful discrimination, harassment, or retaliation must first file a charge with the EEOC. The recently released report provides helpful information regarding the types of charges that employees filed in the 2015 fiscal year, which ran from October 1, 2014 to September 20, 2015.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) is asking the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to recognize that discrimination based on an employee’s sexual orientation constitutes unlawful discrimination “because of . . . sex,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The EEOC advances this argument in an amicus brief in support of Barbara Burrows, a lesbian college professor and administrator who claims she was subjected to sex discrimination by her former employer, the College of Central Florida, based on her same-sex marriage and how she looked and acted. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of the College, holding that Burrows’s sex discrimination claim was “merely a repackaged claim for discrimination based on sexual orientation, which is not cognizable under Title VII.” Burrows appealed, and the case is currently pending before the Eleventh Circuit.