Compliance Stuff

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) is poised to elevate its focus on religious discrimination in the workplace and employers should be alert. With its newly restored quorum allowing Acting Chair Andrea Lucas to move forward with more aggressive enforcement, the agency is expected to pursue a broader litigation agenda emphasizing religious accommodation rights under Title VII. In 2025 alone, the EEOC filed 11 religious discrimination suits, the highest in nearly a decade . Lucas credited the agency’s “tremendous wins” in defending religious liberty and signaled that this momentum will continue. What This Means for Employers The EEOC’s direction marks a clear shift towards faith-based accommodation enforcement following the Supreme Court’s decision in  Groff v. DeJoy,  600 U.S. 447 (2023). Under  Groff,  employers must grant religious accommodations unless doing so would cause substantial increased costs or undue hardship. This standard sets a much...

On May 20, 2025, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) updated its Site-Specific Targeting (SST) inspection program. The SST inspection program is OSHA’s primary planned inspection initiative for non-construction workplaces with 20 or more employees. The updates are expected to increase on-site inspections in highly regulated sectors, such as warehousing, transportation, distribution, and healthcare. For non-construction workplaces, this update marks a significant shift in how OSHA prioritizes enforcement, relying more heavily on employer-reported injury and illness data or the lack thereof. Under the updated SST program, OSHA will utilize Form 300A data from calendar years 2021-2023 to identify workplaces for inspection based on : High injury and illness rates from 2023 data; Upwardly trending injury and illness rates based on 2021-2023 data at or above twice the 2022 private sector average; Injury and illness rates markedly below industry averages; and Failure to ...