Workforce Compliance Intelligence
Workforce Compliance Intelligence
Amber's Take
July is one of those months where the EEOC apparently decided to move fast. In the span of three weeks: they buried a 47-year-old affirmative action rulebook, announced the largest accommodation settlement in recent memory, and today proposed eliminating the EEO-1 report entirely. Cannabis law keeps expanding while the testing science hasn't moved. And two staffing agencies found out the hard way that 'our client told us to' doesn't hold up in federal court.
The through-line this month is the EEOC itself, what it's enforcing, what it's unwinding, and what it's signaling about where employer liability is heading. Working through each of these stories, my own read keeps landing in the same place: I'm generally on board with correcting real imbalances and holding people accountable for discrimination, whichever direction it runs, but I also think good intentions and clean legal lines aren't the same thing, nearly every story this month has a version of that tension baked in. The rules HR leaders thought were settled are being rewritten in real time, and the employers who get caught are usually the ones who hadn't looked at their own processes in a while.
This issue is about giving you a reason to look. You don't have to fix everything this week. But you should know what's changed.
- Amber
On the Radar
EEOC formally removed the 1979 affirmative action interpretive guidelines from the Code of Federal Regulations, including the former safe-harbor framework.
EEOC · workforce policy · employers
This one is going to catch people off guard, because most HR leaders don't think about affirmative action guidelines as a liability shield - they think of them as a compliance burden. But that safe harbor was real.
If you were relying on the old framework to defend your hiring practices and something gets challenged, you just lost your best argument. My advice: don't wait for a charge to find out what your program is actually standing on.
Pull out your AA plan this week and read the legal authority it cites. If it's citing guidelines that no longer exist, that's your Friday afternoon project.
Cannabis protections continue to expand while employers still lack an objective, legally reliable test for at-work impairment.
Cannabis policy · multi-state employers · safety-sensitive roles
Here's what I'm actually seeing from employers: most are paralyzed. They know their old drug policy is probably broken but they don't want to open the can of worms of rewriting it. So they're quietly not enforcing it and hoping nothing happens.
That's the worst of both worlds - you have a policy on paper that exposes you in states with protections, and no policy in practice that protects you if there's an incident. The impairment question is genuinely hard and I'm not going to pretend there's a clean answer.
But 'ignore it and hope' is not a compliance strategy.
Two EEOC actions reinforce that staffing agencies own their referral decisions even when a discriminatory instruction comes from a client.
Staffing · referral process · discrimination risk
Staffing agencies are in a tricky spot because they're trying to keep clients happy and clients sometimes ask for things they shouldn't. But 'the client asked for it' has never been a legal defense, and these two cases back-to-back are a reminder that the EEOC is paying attention to how agencies operate, not just employers.
If you're running a staffing firm, the question isn't whether you would intentionally discriminate - it's whether your process would catch it if a recruiter quietly complied with a discriminatory client request.
Most agencies I talk to don't have a real answer to that question.
Battelle Energy Alliance agreed to pay $5 million after the EEOC found religious and disability accommodation failures affecting more than 100 employees.
Accommodations · healthcare · government contractors
What makes this one important isn't the $5 million - it's the number of employees involved and the chair's statement. The EEOC is signaling that vaccine mandate accommodation failures are not a closed chapter.
If your organization still has any residual policy language from a mandate - even if the mandate itself is no longer active - and you haven't documented how accommodations were handled, you have an unreviewed exposure. This is especially true for healthcare systems and federal contractors who had mandates with teeth.
The time to audit your records on this is now, before someone files a charge.
The EEOC proposed rescinding EEO-1 through EEO-6 reporting requirements. This is a proposed rule, not final, and the public-comment window is open.
EEO-1 · workforce reporting · HR leadership
This is the one that's going to hit HR leaders' inboxes this week and they're going to have questions. The EEO-1 has been a fixture of HR compliance for 60 years. The EEOC is now saying not only should employers stop filing it - they're saying the collection itself may be unconstitutional. That's a significant statement.
For now, employers should keep their current processes in place - this is proposed, not final.
But the compliance posture is shifting fast, and if you have DEI reporting built around EEO-1 data cycles, you need to be thinking about what your program looks like without that infrastructure.
Virginia’s clean-slate framework is operational, changing what employers may see in reports and how state-specific policies need to be interpreted.
Record sealing · Virginia employers · multi-state hiring
I actually like the "clean slate" philosophy, non-convictions are fair to remove, since nothing was ever proven. Convictions, though, are where I draw the line; I don't think employers should lose visibility there just because time passed.
The bigger catch: there's no federal definition of "felony" or "misdemeanor" every state sets its own, so the same conduct can be a felony in one state and barely a blip in another. A blanket "no felonies" policy simply doesn't hold up once you're hiring across state lines.
Bottom line for employers: know where each state you hire in draws these lines, and build your internal policy to match
With thanks to Deena DiSesa, Growth Frame Advisors, for her contribution to this month’s conversation.
The Watchlist
Virginia record sealing is a developing state-level issue we will continue to monitor in future Radar updates.
One Question Amber's Getting
Each month I answer one question I’m hearing from HR and compliance teams-directly and practically.
Q: We're a mid-size employer in three states, two of which now have cannabis off-duty-use protections. We still want to maintain a drug-free workplace. Is that even possible?
A: Yes, but 'drug-free workplace' means something more specific now than it used to. You can still prohibit on-duty impairment and on-premises use - those protections hold up even in states with off-duty protections. What you generally can't do in those states is take adverse action based solely on a positive test result for someone who wasn't impaired at work. The practical answer is to separate your policy into two parts: a clear on-duty impairment standard with documentation procedures, and a separate drug testing policy that accounts for state-by-state rules. One blanket policy across all three states is probably already creating exposure. Get employment counsel to look at it state by state.