NEW YORK (AP) — The federal agency for protecting workers’ civil rights revealed Wednesday that it is investigating sportswear giant Nike for allegedly discriminating against white employees through its diversity policies.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disclosed the investigation in a motion filed in Missouri federal court demanding that Nike fully comply with a subpoena for information.
The EEOC sought the company’s criteria for selecting employees for layoffs, how it tracks and uses worker race and ethnicity data, and information about programs which allegedly provided race-restricted mentoring, leadership, or career development opportunities, according to court documents.
In a statement, Nike said the company has worked to cooperate with the EEOC and the subpoena “feels like a surprising and unusual escalation.”
“We have shared thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses to the EEOC’s inquiry and are in the process of providing additional information,” Nike said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has moved swiftly to target diversity and inclusion policies that she has long criticized as potentially discriminatory, tightly aligning the agency with one of President Donald Trump’s top priorities.
Nike appears to be the highest profile company the EEOC has targeted with a publicly confirmed, formal anti-DEI investigation. In November, the EEOC issued a similar subpoena against financial services provider Northwestern Mutual.
“When there are compelling indications, including corporate admissions in extensive public materials, that an employer’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related programs may violate federal prohibitions against race discrimination or other forms of unlawful discrimination, the EEOC will take all necessary steps — including subpoena actions — to ensure the opportunity to fully and comprehensively investigate,” Lucas said in a statement.
The disclosure comes two months after Lucas posted a social media call-out urging white men to come forward if they have experienced race or sex discrimination at work. The post urged eligible workers to reach out to the agency “as soon as possible” and referred users to the agency’s fact sheet on DEI-related discrimination.
The investigation against Nike, however, does not stem from any worker complaint against the company. Rather, Lucas filed her own complaint in May 2024 through a more rarely used tool known as a commissioner’s charge, according to the court documents. Her charge came just months after America First Legal, a conservative legal group founded by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sent the EEOC a letter outlining complaints against Nike and urging the agency to file a commissioner’s charge.
America First Legal has flooded the EEOC with similar letters in recent years urging investigations into the DEI practices of major U.S. companies. It is unclear how many other companies the EEOC may be targeting through such commissioner’s charges. The EEOC is prohibited from revealing any charge — by workers or commissioners — unless it results in fines, settlements, legal action or other such public actions.
Lucas’ charge, according to court filings, was based on Nike’s publicly shared information about its commitment to diversity, including statements from executives and proxy statements. The charge, for example, cited Nike’s publicly stated goal in 2021 of achieving 35% representation of racial and ethnic minorities in its corporate workforce by 2025.
Many U.S. companies made similar commitments in the wake of the widespread 2020 racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Companies have said such commitments are not quotas but rather goals they hoped to achieve through methods such as widening recruitment efforts and rooting out any bias during hiring process.
Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers are prohibited from using race as a criteria for hiring or other employment decisions. Lucas has long warned that many companies risk crossing that line through DEI efforts that would pressure managers to make race-based decisions.
In its statement, Nike said it follows “all applicable laws, including those that prohibit discrimination. We believe our programs and practices are consistent with those obligations and take these matters seriously.”
Global fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken has agreed to pay two Orlando employees $100,000 each in compensatory and punitive damages to address sexual harassment and retaliation charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal investigative agency.
“Every employee deserves a workplace free from harassment, discrimination and retaliation,” Kristen Foslid, a regional attorney for the EEOC’s Miami District, said in a statement. “By resolving this matter, the EEOC is ensuring that these workers receive justice, and that KFC implements measures to prevent future misconduct.”
The location of the Orlando-based KFC involved in this case is not specified, and the EEOC declined to offer specifics or additional information about the case when reached by Orlando Weekly for comment.
According to the federal agency, KFC Corp. subjected the two KFC employees in Orlando to a sexually hostile work environment and retaliated against at least one of the workers by firing her in 2022 over speaking up about sexual harassment on the job. No additional details on the harassment that took place were immediately made available by the EEOC.
The KFC worker who was fired, however, filed charges with the EEOC, which subsequently investigated the matter and found “reasonable cause” that KFC had violated federal Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, including sexual harassment and retaliation in the workplace. The agency’s investigation also identified another employee affected by the same misconduct.
According to the EEOC, KFC’s agreement to pay the workers $200,000 comes as the result of a conciliation process, meaning the agency did not take KFC to court but rather resolved the complaint through a pre-litigation conciliation process. Still, like its major fast food competitors Chick-Fil-A and McDonald’s franchises, allegations of sexual harassment aren’t a first for KFC, a Kentucky-headquartered chain with over 30,000 locations in 150 countries and territories worldwide.
Sexual harassment is a pervasive issue in the food and hospitality industries especially, with young women particularly vulnerable to harassment on the job. As of 2017, more sexual harassment claims were made in the restaurant industry than any other, affecting both men and women.
Contributing factors that can make restaurant workers more susceptible to harassment on the job include power dynamics at play in low-wage work environments and a mentality of “the customer is always right” that can downplay or otherwise undermine experiences of customer abuse and harassment targeting workers.
Florida saw one of the highest numbers of sex-based discrimination claims in the U.S. in 2024, according to EEOC data, lagging only behind Texas (another Southern state with weak state-level labor protections). Nearly 2,000 sex discrimination complaints filed with the federal agency in 2024 came from Florida (compared to roughly 2,800 from Texas), on top of 2,411 charges of illegal retaliation in violation of Title VII.
In this latest case in Orlando, KFC reportedly agreed to implement annual training on sex discrimination for staff and human resources, according to the EEOC’s news release. KFC will also change its workplace policies to explicitly prohibit sex-based discrimination (something we’re kind of stunned wasn’t already in place) and agreed to report on any future sexual discrimination complaints over the next three years.
KFC did not return a request for comment from Orlando Weekly on this sexual harassment case, or their existing anti-discrimination policies, ahead of publication. We will add any comment from them that comes in as an update to this post.
The head of the U.S. agency for enforcing workplace civil rights posted a social media call-out urging white men to come forward if they have experienced race or sex discrimination at work.
“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas, a vocal critic of DEI, wrote on X Wednesday evening. The post urged eligible workers to reach out to the agency “as soon as possible” and referred users to the agency’s fact sheet on “DEI-related discrimination” for more information.
Lucas’ post, viewed millions of times, was shared about two hours after Vice President JD Vance posted an article he said “describes the evil of DEI and its consequences,” which also received millions of views. Lucas responded to Vance’s post saying: “Absolutely right @JDVance. And precisely because this widespread, systemic, unlawful discrimination primarily harmed white men, elites didn’t just turn a blind eye; they celebrated it. Absolutely unacceptable; unlawful; immoral.”
She added that the EEOC “won’t rest until this discrimination is eliminated.” Neither the agency nor Vance responded immediately to requests for additional comment.
Since being named acting chair of the EEOC in January, Lucas has been shifting the agency’s focus to prioritize “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” aligning with President Donald Trump’s own anti-DEI executive orders. Trump named Lucas as the agency’s chair in November.
Earlier this year, the EEOC along with the Department of Justice issued two “technical assistance” documents attempting to clarify what might constitute “DEI-related Discrimination at Work” and providing guidance on how workers can file complaints over such concerns. The documents took broad aim at practices such as training, employee resource groups and fellowship programs, warning such programs — depending on how they’re constructed — could run afoul of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race and gender.
David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NYU School of Law, said Lucas’s latest social media posts demonstrate a “fundamental misunderstanding of what DEI is.”
“It’s really much more about creating a culture in which you get the most out of everyone who you’re bringing on board, where everyone experiences fairness and equal opportunity, including white men and members of other groups,” Glasgow said.
The Meltzer Center tracks lawsuits that are likely to affect workplace DEI practices, including 57 cases of workplace discrimination. Although there are instances in which it occurs on a case-by-case basis, Glasgow said he has not seen “any kind of systematic evidence that white men are being discriminated against.”
He pointed out that Fortune 500 CEOs are overwhelmingly white men, and that relative to their share of the population, the demographic is overrepresented in corporate senior leadership, Congress, and beyond.
“If DEI has been this engine of discrimination against white men, I have to say it hasn’t really been doing a very good job at achieving that,” Glasgow said.
Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chair and now a partner at law firm Outten & Golden, said it is “unusual” and “problematic” for the head of the agency to single out a particular demographic group for civil rights enforcement.
“It suggests some sort of priority treatment,” Yang said. “That’s not something that sounds to me like equal opportunity for all.”
On the other hand, the agency has done the opposite for transgender workers, whose discrimination complaints have been deprioritized or dropped completely, Yang said. The EEOC has limited resources, and must accordingly prioritize which cases to pursue. But treating charges differently based on workers’ identities goes against the mission of the agency, she said.
“It worries me that a message is being sent that the EEOC only cares about some workers and not others,” Yang said.
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California universities are facing intense backlash for handing over employees’ personal contact information to the Trump administration as it investigates allegations of campus antisemitism, amping up tensions over government incursions into higher education.
At Cal State, a faculty union filed suit Friday in state court after learning the personal phone numbers and email addresses of 2,600 Los Angeles campus employees were turned over to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating employee complaints of campus antisemitism. In addition, the EEOC is contacting Jewish faculty across the 22-campus system, prompting campus demonstrations against cooperating with Trump.
At UC Berkeley, protesters recently converged on campus after University of California leaders said they released files from their civil rights office and UC police incident reports containing the names and contact information of 160 faculty and staff to the Education Department, which is also investigating alleged campus antisemitism.
UC-wide faculty senate leaders are demanding to know whether there have been other campus disclosures. UC has not publicly announced similar actions outside of Berkeley — but has not denied the possibility.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has intervened. The governor said he received a report last week from UC leadership on the data release that made a “compelling case” that UC was legally required to share information with the government. Newsom said he was still “reviewing” the report. The governor also said he may similarly scrutinize CSU’s actions.
Federal requests for campus data are not unusual in civil rights or employment discrimination investigations, legal experts say. But what is exceptional is the large-scale nature of the demands. CSU was ordered under subpoena to release employee information. UC says it negotiated over government asks to provide employee data — first offering redacted files — before relenting.
The orders come against the backdrop of President Trump’s aggressive campaign to force higher education institutions to align with his conservative agenda. The administration has suspended billions in research grants and has offered to absolve alleged campus violations in exchange for hefty fines and sweeping policy changes.
Broad size and scope
Legal experts said they were not surprised investigations were taking place, citing campus civil rights complaints over the years and Trump administration declarations that prioritize combating antisemitism.
Brian Soucek, UC Davis law professor, worried the antisemitism investigations — which involve nearly every California public university — are “a witch hunt.”
The EEOC has powers to subpoena relevant information needed “to advance some lawful purpose,” said Soucek, who teaches about equality and free speech law. “The question is whether these [actions] are overly broad.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said “asking for information about individuals and groups of individuals in the course of an investigation is about as unusual as traffic on the 405. But it is entirely appropriate to mistrust the Trump administration.” Mitchell, whose group represents 1,600 campuses, said schools are “between a proverbial rock and hard place.”
Spokespeople for the Education Department and EEOC did not reply to requests for comment.
UC and CSU’s views
Caught between the government and faculty are campus administrators, some who have expressed distrust of Trump’s civil rights investigations. But they fear that resisting would not only be illegal but could result in devastating funding cuts.
In recent faculty meetings, UC President James B. Milliken has declined to say whether other campuses aside from Berkeley have shared personal information of employees or students. Speaking at a UC-wide academic senate meeting Thursday, Milliken said he understood employee concerns and argued that data sharing was routine across presidential administrations.
He said the university was not handing over lists of faculty names but that broader documents shared with the government contained personnel information.
Milliken said UC is also working to fulfill data sharing requirements under a December 2024 agreement with the Biden administration that has carried over to this year.
That agreement resolved civil rights complaints — over antisemitism and bias against Muslim, Arab and pro-Palestinian students — at the Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses. It required UC to share “an electronic sortable spreadsheet” with details on who reported civil rights complaints and who they were lodged against for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years.
“Failure to comply with government oversight could result in a very significant loss of funding, potentially jeopardizing tens of thousands of jobs, the education of our students, the research careers of thousands of faculty, and the care afforded by our health enterprise,” Milliken recently wrote to campuses.
Administrators at both systems said they tried to resist or minimize government requests and have made strides to protect privacy while complying with the law.
At CSU, officials told the EEOC that the Los Angeles campus would only turn over publicly available data — such as university email addresses. But then the campus was subpoenaed for personal data.
Over the spring, the EEOC also subpoenaed UC for information on hundreds of employees who had signed letters in 2023 and 2024 expressing concern about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the campus climate for Jewish people, according to faculty contacted by EEOC investigators who they said informed them about the legal order.
The EEOC’s systemwide CSU investigation has not yet involved a subpoena for other Cal State campuses.
Tensions grow
Faculty, staff, students and unions have pushed back, saying university leaders should have rejected government demands, moves many say weaponize antisemitism charges for ideological goals.
“Rather than taking a stance against an authoritarian regime, CSU leadership has chosen to be complicit,” said the California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 employees.
The union’s suit in state court asks for a judge to order CSU to avoid disclosing union members’ personal information in response to federal subpoenas without giving notice to affected employees and offering a chance for faculty to reject the request.
Peyrin Kao, a pro-Palestinian electrical engineering and computer science lecturer, was among those who UC Berkeley notified that their names were in files given to the government.
“They didn’t tell me why I was reported,” said Kao, who suspects the move was tied complaints in 2023 over an optional lecture he gave against Israel’s war in Gaza and UC’s investments in weapons companies. After the lecture, the university issued him a warning about potential violation of a policy against “political indoctrination.”
“Showing everyone that you can get reported for pro-Palestine speech does have a chilling effect,” Kao said.
Jewish voices
Ryan Witt, president of the CSU Channel Islands chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, agreed. Witt, who is Jewish and organized a recent protest against the investigation and “repressive” CSU free speech policies, felt that antisemitism was not a “major issue” on campus.
Other Jewish community members elsewhere differed.
Jeffrey Blutinger, director of Jewish Studies at Cal State Long Beach, filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the university.
(Gary Coronado/For The Times)
Referring to Trump’s higher education policies and antisemitism, Cal State Long Beach Jewish Studies professor Jeff Blutinger said he “shouldn’t be required to choose which threat I ignore.”
Blutinger made a report last summer to the commission about a February 2024 an incident where police shut down a guest lecture he presented at San Jose State University after protesters demonstrated in the hallway outside the classroom. He laid blame on the university and police for not protecting his right to speak about Israelis and Palestinians.
But he said the EEOC investigator he spoke to last month told him the probe was not tied to that complaint, which was closed for being too old. Instead, it was about a May 2024 public letter to CSU leaders that Blutinger signed, expressing worry over the “well-being of Jewish and Israeli students, staff, and faculty.”
Another signatory the EEOC contacted last month is Arik Davidyan, an assistant professor of physiology at Sacramento State University. Davidyan said he told the investigator that “our administration has worked a lot with the Jewish community to address our concerns.”
Tackling discrimination
Some leaders at UC and CSU have expressed frustration, saying efforts to combat discrimination and anti-Israel sentiment have gone unnoticed by the government.
At UC, protest rules have been revamped with bans on encampments, masking to hide identity while breaking the law, and student government boycotts of Israel. New training programs on antisemitism are underway.
CSU also revamped protest policies and in the last fiscal year spent nearly $16 million to expand systemwide and campus-level civil rights programs. In the coming months, it is rolling out a new case management system to track discrimination complaints.
“We’re working as hard as we possibly can to address antisemitism and to address any of the protected characteristic discrimination issues that may arise,” said Dawn S. Theodora, the system’s interim executive vice chancellor and general counsel. “We take it very seriously.”
Business owners face one less threat of falling afoul of federal regulations, though that might not be good news to all entrepreneurs. This week, the Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) officially abandoned investigations of any discrimination complaints based on disparate impact liability, long viewed as an effective legal tool in those cases.
What that means for employers is they no longer have to worry about being pursued by federal agencies for allegedly having policies or business practices that may unintentionally disadvantage certain groups of employees in hiring or promotion decisions. That’s the consequence of the EEOC now acting on an April executive order requiring all area, local, and district offices to cease pursuing worker complaints founded on disparate liability impact grounds, according to an internal memo reported by the Associated Press.
For decades, that legal concept has allowed the EEOC and other agencies to investigate, and at times censure workplace procedures that upon first view may appear fair — but whose application are found to create discriminatory challenges or obstacles for certain workers. The order to cease use of disparate impact means that as of September 30, EEOC officials dropped all open inquiries based on that legal liability, and refuse to accept additional complaints citing it.
‘Crippling legal liability’
The EEOC action comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders to eliminate diversity, equality, and inclusion policies and equality opportunity practices by federal agencies — and encourage the spread of those prohibitions to the private sector. That’s happening through campaigns pressuring organizations and businesses to abandon a range of principles Trump and his supporters decry as “woke.” Disparate impact liability clearly falls into that category.
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“Disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability,” said Trump’s April 23 executive order, which the EEOC has now applied. “It not only undermines our national values, but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
While constituting a main plank of his political platform, Trump’s efforts to eliminate so-called “woke” concepts or policies in federal agencies is being paired with his effort to spare employers the time and money required to comply with numerous regulations.
In banning disparate impact liability as part of that drive to ease life for businesses, Trump’s order decries the legal concept for creating “near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination… even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved.”
Most, if not all business owners, are likely to be relieved at no longer running the risk of being called out by the EEOC for well-intended policies that inadvertently produce discriminatory effects. But entrepreneurs who believe employers should be held accountable for both intentional and accidental bias against any employee may feel troubled by the disparate impact liability ban.
That concern may be all the greater with the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in hiring, staff management, and promotion decisions that’s rapidly expanding across business.
The reason? Evidence indicates that AI tools digest and act upon all the biases of humans overseeing their development and training. Meanwhile as AI platforms continue vacuuming up vast amounts of information to broaden their response capabilities, they also integrate partialities, or even prejudices from their data sources — including flawed internal employer practices.
Indeed, Amazon stopped using an app that analyzed resumes sent in by higher-level recruits when the company realized the technology was favoring male candidates. In doing so, the automated AI agent apparently reflected conscious and unconscious biases in Amazon’s predominantly male tech workforce. By contrast, job post platform Indeed has developed an AI agent to help employers avoid unwanted biases in their decisions and policies.
‘Resegregate the workforce’
As small business owners and corporate giants continue adopting AI tools in their businesses, worries are rising that the biases contained in the data that apps operate on will increase the number of discriminatory company policies.
“As AI is becoming more and more popular, it’s particularly important that we have the disparate impact tools available to be able to police it and make sure it’s not being used to resegregate the workforce,” said civil rights and plaintiff-side employment attorney Christine Webber told the Associated Press.
Despite Trump’s order and the EEOC’s new prohibition of disparate impact liability, companies would be wise to keep an eye open to any possibly unintentional discrimination results of their policies.
As labor relations law firm Littler notes, even if the EEOC has abandoned disparate impact as grounds for investigating worker complaints, it remains an applicable discrimination charge under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That means that even though plaintiffs must first make what will now be a doomed disparate impact liability complaint to the EEOC, they can then file that as a suit in civil court once the federal agency rejects it.
“Moreover, many states impose laws establishing disparate impact liability under their state non-discrimination laws,” a Littler blog post on the EEOC ban said. “Employers facing challenges to employment practices or charges of discrimination alleging disparate impact liability are advised to consult with counsel.”
Meaning, even business owners who cheer the demise of disparate impact liability for the same reasons Trump banned it may still find themselves as concerned about its various consequences as less enthusiastic entrepreneurs worried it may result in increased workplace discrimination.
