New England Biz Law Update
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Office of General Counsel (OGC) Annual Report and a new data dashboard featuring selected cases that have been resolved over the past five fiscal years.
In FY 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, 2023, the EEOC filed 143 merits lawsuits, an increase of more than 50% compared to FY 2022.
Of those cases, 25 were systemic and 32 were non-systemic class action suits. According to the EEOC, systemic suits are pattern or practice, policy and/or class action cases in which the discrimination has a broad impact on a profession, company, industry or geographic location.
The EEOC resolved 98 of the suits, yielding $22.6 million in awards for 968 employees. The agency reached a successful outcome in 91% of all suit resolutions.
Here is some data gleaned from the lawsuits (some percentages do not add up to 100%, given that some cases had multiple allegations):
- During this time, cases most frequently involved allegations of retaliation (39.2%), sex (35%), disability (34.3%), and race (16.8%) discrimination.
- At the end of FY 2023, the EEOC had 227 merits cases on its active district court docket. Of those, 95 (41.8%) were class action suits or systemic cases.
- In FY 2023, the EEOC resolved 14 systemic suits, obtaining equitable relief and more than $11.7 million for approximately 806 individuals.
The EEOC has also expanded its dashboard of “EEOC Explore Tool” data visualizations of aggregated charge data, workforce demographic data, and limited employer-reported pay data, to include selected litigation cases resolved in FY 2019 to FY 2023. The commission plans to add additional data in future years.
