December 16, 2025
The agency is unlawfully giving up on fighting disparate impact discrimination—meaning it’s “open season” on employees.
In August of 2022, just after Prime Day, Leah Cross started working as an Amazon delivery driver in Colorado. She took the job because she had long heard that it was a decent and paid well. She thought it would be a way to get her foot in with a reputable company that offered good benefits. But in the end, “It was kind of the complete opposite of my experience there,” she said.
What Cross found soon after starting was “shocking,” she said. The company gave her quotas so high that she was making over 200 stops a day; each stop could include delivering to a dozen homes. She was closely monitored by video cameras, and if she started to lag behind the company’s targets, a supervisor would call her. She was working 10-to-12-hour days, but the quotas meant that she didn’t have any time for necessary breaks. One day early in her employment at Amazon, she stopped to get menstruation products and got a disciplinary call from a dispatch officer. Normally, that would have resulted in a write-up, but she got away with a verbal warning.
The inability to take bathroom breaks became a particular problem. If she stopped at a bathroom along her route, she would receive calls from supervisors asking where she had gone and if she was lost. Higher-ups told her that in order to meet the company’s quotas, she would have to buy “devices,” she recalled—she ended up getting a funnel that facilitated urinating into a water bottle. She tried to hold her bladder for as long as possible, but once it became “a dire situation,” she said, she had to close the van doors and urinate into a bottle in the back, carefully avoiding the surveillance cameras. She started bringing a gym bag packed with supplies: bottles to hold urine, trash bags to dispose of them, and extra clothes in case she peed on what she was wearing. “It kind of felt like you were loading up to go to war just to deliver some packages,” she said. Sometimes she would open the van doors after she was done only to be confronted by a waiting customer looking for a package, flooding her with embarrassment.
Cross’s inability to take regular bathroom breaks led to kidney issues and yeast infections. Even today, she deals with the aftereffects, having to remind herself that at her job at a nursing home she can use the bathroom whenever she needs to. “It’s something I still got to work on and get over,” she said.
In May 2023, Cross filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, a state-level agency that processes workplace discrimination claims under state law as well as on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the sole federal agency tasked with enforcing private sector workers’ rights. She alleged that Amazon discriminated against her and other delivery drivers by imposing such demanding quotas that they were forced go without bathroom breaks, a practice she alleged had a disparate impact on people with vaginas who struggled to pee into bottles. “Disparate impact” is a legal standard that requires courts to look at the impact, not the intent, of laws to determine if they are discriminatory. To find that Amazon had discriminated on a disparate impact basis, the agency wouldn’t need to uncover evidence of deliberate discrimination against women; even a universal policy like denying all workers bathroom breaks could be discriminatory if it disproportionately harmed a protected class of workers under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Cross’s claim was later transferred to the EEOC. The agency told her in December 2024 it was “very interested” in moving forward with her case. Cross described herself as a wallflower, not eager to bring a spotlight to herself, but she knew that bringing the case would represent “something much greater than just my life.”
But in late September, Cross was notified by the EEOC that her charge was being closed. It wasn’t for a lack of evidence of discrimination; it didn’t have anything to do with the merits of her allegation at all. The agency had, contra years of precedent, its own statute, and settled law, decided to abandon all disparate impact discrimination charges and litigation.
. . .
Disparate impact cases involve employer policies or practices that appear to be neutral but result in a discriminatory outcome without having any relevance to the job itself. Think of a height and weight test to be a firefighter, a poor substitute for a strength test that excludes women, or mandatory medical exams for retail jobs that systematically shut out people with disabilities who could otherwise perform the work. Proving that something violates the disparate impact standard doesn’t require proving that there was intent to discriminate, which is a high bar to clear, just that the outcome was unnecessarily discriminatory.
. . .
In doing so, the agency is likely violating the law, said Jenny Yang, a partner at law firm Outten Golden and former EEOC chair, and Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein. The Supreme Court has consistently found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits disparate impact discrimination, dating back to a 1971 case. Then Congress overwhelmingly passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codified disparate impact discrimination as prohibited by Title VII. “This is clearly established law,” Sellers said.
To have the agency abandon it, then, is “probably unlawful,” Sellers said. Under statute, the agency must look into all claims workers file. Executive orders don’t have the legal authority to change or enact law, and disparate impact has been written into law for 34 years. “The agency has made a blanket decision that is at odds with its statutory mandate to enforce the law,” Yang said.
“There’s never been a wholesale refusal to process disparate impact claims before,” Sellers said. “This is entirely new and extraordinary.”
. . .
Without the EEOC pursuing these claims, and with many workers unable to carry them forward on their own, it “permits these long-standing practices that may not be justified as a matter of law to continue,” Sellers said. Employers, no longer fearing enforcement from the EEOC, won’t have an incentive to fix discriminatory policies. They might even fear incurring the wrath of the Trump administration if they collect data and try to remedy any potentially discriminatory practices. Hiring practices that disproportionately keep Black people or women out, or workplace policies that unnecessarily harm Latinos or people with disabilities, will remain unchecked. Companies will say to themselves, “This is not something we have to worry about,” Lopez said, “because who’s going to come after us?
Read The EEOC Is Now Letting Workplace Discrimination Stand.