Free Republic

Federal authorities moved Friday to drop a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain, part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to halt the use of a key tool for enforcing the country’s civil rights laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the top federal agency for enforcing workers rights, filed a motion in a Pennsylvania federal court to dismiss the Sheetz lawsuit, citing Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to deprioritize the use of “disparate impact liability” in civil rights enforcement. Disparate impact liability holds that policies that are neutral on their face can violate...

Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully stopped an enforcement guidance issued under former President Joe Biden that sought to redefine the definition of “discrimination” to include self-professed “gender identity.” This unlawful rewrite of federal law would have opened private and state employers to lawsuits if they did not adopt sweeping “transgender” inclusive policies. “The Biden Administration unlawfully tried to twist federal law into a tool for advancing radical gender ideology by attempting to force employers to adopt ‘transgender’ policies or risk being sued,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The federal government has no right to force Texans to play along with...

A U.S. district judge has ruled that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) exceeded its authority when it inserted abortion accommodations into the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) — and must now remove them. KEY TAKEAWAYS: A U.S. District judge said changes made to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act by the Biden administration were ‘unlawful’ and must be removed. The lawsuit was brought by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which had originally supported the Act as written and passed in 2023. The USCCB argued that if Congress had intended to include abortion in the PWFA in 2023,...

A Trump-appointed judge ruled Wednesday that employers are not obligated to provide workers with time off for abortion procedures, striking down a controversial Biden-era regulation. U.S. District Judge David Joseph of the Western District of Louisiana ruled that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)’s regulation — implemented during the Biden administration — exceeded its authority by including abortion among pregnancy-related conditions requiring job protections, The Associated Press reported. The EEOC’s rule implemented the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), which was passed in December 2022 with bipartisan support. The law requires employers with 15 or more employees to provide “reasonable accommodations...

Forty-four of the nation’s largest law firms were hit with a discrimination complaint on Monday alleging that they use an outside staffing agency to hire interns based on race, putting Big Law on track for another clash with the Trump administration. The complaint, filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, targets Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a nonprofit that places minority students at elite firms the summer before their first year of law school. The paid internship often leads to a return offer the following summers, giving recipients an extraordinary leg up on their white peers. Americans for Opportunity, the...

Two Christian organizations have asked a federal court to rule against former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member Jocelyn Samuels, a Democrat who is suing after being fired by President Donald Trump, arguing that her support for employment gender identity and abortion mandates violated their religious freedom. On Thursday, the Christian Employers Alliance and Choices Pregnancy Centers of Greater Phoenix, Inc. filed a motion to intervene in Samuel's reinstatement suit. They are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom. "The Court should not assess Samuels' removal's validity without hearing from the very employers that the removal seeks to protect," the brief...

Move highlights how legal threats from the Trump administration are discouraging DEI.. Illinois has suspended a minority-only scholarship after the Department of Justice threatened to sue the state, the department said Friday. The department’s move, which came in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report on the program, is the latest example of how the Trump administration’s legal saber-rattling has deterred the use of racial preferences. The program, which gave minorities financial aid to complete a master's or doctoral degree, was run by the Illinois Board of Higher Education and included some of the top universities in the state,...

Companies that prefer migrants and H-1B visa workers over Americans will face federal investigations and discrimination lawsuits, says Andrea Lucas, who President Donald Trump picked to serve as acting chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). “The EEOC is putting employers and other covered entities on notice: if you are part of the pipeline contributing to our immigration crisis or abusing our legal immigration system via illegal preferences against American workers, you must stop,” Lucas said in a February 20 notice. “The law applies to you, and you are not above the law. The EEOC is here to...

Eighteen states filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Monday, saying it is illegally enforcing pro-transgender rules on companies and their employees. Attorneys general from 18 states, led by Tennessee, filed a lawsuit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Justice, arguing that the government is seeking “to enshrine sweeping gender-identity mandates without congressional consent.” The lawsuit laments the EEOC’s “Enforcement Document” declaring that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “requires all covered employers and employees to use others’ preferred pronouns; allow transgender individuals to use the shower, locker room, or restroom that corresponds...

While much of the attention in Washington, DC has been on passage of the high profile foreign aid bills in this sharply divided Congress, the Biden administration has been hard at work using their many administrative tools to expand abortion. Several controversial abortion-expanding rules were recently finalized. In addition, a new bill was introduced in the Senate to require the Biden administration to provide real data on abortions being done under a new controversial Veterans Affairs directive. EEOC and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act In June 2023, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) took effect after passing with wide bi-partisan...

President Joe Biden’s deputies are forcing transgenderism into workplaces via updated federal workplace guidelines that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released. Under the guidance, employers who adhere to biological reality — expecting biological males to use the men’s restroom and biological women to use the women’s restroom — will be committing workplace “harassment” if they refuse to allow employees to choose restrooms based on their gender identity rather than biological sex. Further, employers will be committing workplace harassment if they “repeatedly misgender” employees, according to reports. According to a press release from the EEOC, “These laws protect covered employees...

ALTOONA, Pennsylvania — The oldest gas station in America still in operation, Reighard’s here in this Blair County city, got its start in 1908 when a local blacksmith decided to sell gasoline out the back of his shop when the Model T was introduced. It has been open ever since. While architecturally it is underwhelming, the service is good because the people who work there care about the work they do, whether it is pumping gas, washing your windshield, or doing minor fixes on your car. It is important to them that you return. While Reighard’s holds the title of...

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - On Thursday, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced a lawsuit against Sheetz, alleging the convenience store and gas chain of denying employment to a class of job application due to their race. The U.S. EEOC alleges that Sheetz has a practice of screening all applicants for records of criminal conviction and then denying them employment based on said record. The EEOC's charge claims that Sheetz disproportionally screened out applicants who are black, Native American, and multiracial.

A pregnant Walgreens employee wasn’t allowed to leave work to see her doctor when she began spotting blood, according to a newly settled federal lawsuit. Her manager refused to let her go until someone could fill in for her — but then said “she could not find a replacement for her” at the store in Alexandria, Louisiana, the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says. Now, Walgreens has agreed to pay $205,000 to settle the lawsuit accusing the company of pregnancy and disability discrimination, the EEOC said in a March 15 news release. The company is required...

As we all have seen, corporate America has become militantly pro-LGBT and anti-Christian over the past few decades.... James Earls has worked at UPS for 35 years and is a devout Christian. He has received some of UPS’s highest awards for safety and loyalty. He is a driver of a large UPS “feeder truck.” He lives in Alabama and is represented by Teamsters Local 402. .. During the celebration of Gay Pride Month a few years ago, James entered the UPS facility in Madison, Alabama. UPS was showing its support and dedication to the LGBT movement by broadcasting images on...

Biology Professor Fired for Teaching…Biology A Texas biology professor fired for what attorneys say were "standard principles about human biology and reproduction" has filed a complaint against his former employer. Dr. Johnson Varkey, a former adjunct professor at St. Philip's College in San Antonio, filed a charge of discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after he was fired in January in response to what the community college said were "numerous complaints" about a lesson he taught last fall on human biology, according to Plano-based First Liberty Institute. The complaint — which accused Varkey of "religious preaching, discriminatory...

A federal agency cannot force a Texas-based conservative Christian business to comply with policies barring discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees or job applicants, a federal appeals court has ruled. The decision by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity cannot deny Braidwood Management an exemption from anti-discrimination policies designed to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act. Braidwood is entitled to the exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the ruling said. “Being forced to employ someone to represent the company who behaves...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released updated guidance on Tuesday saying that an individual can be considered to have a disability after contracting COVID-19 under certain circumstances. According to the EEOC's new guidance, a person who has or was previously diagnosed with COVID-19 can be considered disabled if the condition or any the symptoms they experience cause “physical or mental” impairment that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.” People who tested positive for COVID-19 but were asymptomatic or experienced mild symptoms that resolved without issue will not be considered disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA),...

Despite the implications of effectively banning higher percentages of black people from their premises, many major employers, especially universities, have mandated COVID vaccination.While 46 percent of white Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine shot by now, only 33 percent of black Americans have done the same, according to the federal data available as of June 21 and analyzed most recently by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This means that, under the “disparate impact” standard now used to convict a workplace of racial discrimination under federal regulations and to accuse the United States of “systemic racism,” any use of...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says there’s nothing in federal law that can prevent an employer from compelling employees to be vaccinated in order to work.However, the EEOC also said that for employees who have a religious objection or a physical disability that prevents them from receiving the vaccine, an employer must provide “reasonable accommodations.” Those accommodations could include forcing an unvaccinated employee to wear a mask, be socially distanced from other employees, or allowed to work from home.Wall Street Journal:The updated guidance is intended to answer frequently asked questions, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows said in a statement. She said...