NEW YORK (AP) — A former Amazon delivery driver has filed a lawsuit accusing a federal civil right agency of abruptly and unlawfully abandoning her sex discrimination case and others like it following an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit filed by the former Colorado driver demands that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resume investigating her claims that Amazon discriminates against female drivers by failing to provide adequate bathroom breaks.
The lawsuit is the latest example of workers and others scrambling to find recourse as federal agencies abandon their cases in response to Trump’s shake-up of the country’s civil rights enforcement infrastructure.
The EEOC, which enforces civil rights laws in the workplace, decided last month to discharge any complaints based on “disparate impact liability,” which holds that policies that are neutral on their face can be discriminatory if they impose unnecessary barriers that disadvantage different demographic groups.
The EEOC's decision came in response to an executive order in April directing federal agencies to deprioritize the use of disparate impact liability. The Trump administration argues that disparate impact assumes any racial or gender imbalance in workplaces is the result of discrimination and leads to practices that undermine meritocracy.
The former driver, Leah Cross, filed a motion Tuesday asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to stay the EEOC’s new rule prohibiting investigations and enjoin the agency from enforcing it.
The EEOC has already dropped its sole lawsuit arising from a disparate impact liability charge, a case alleging that the Sheetz convenience store chain's background check practices discriminated against Black, Native American and multiracial job applicants.
Separately, the agency has dropped lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers and subjected new complaints to a higher level of scrutiny, following Trump's executive order declaring that the government would only recognize two unchangeable sexes.
It's unclear how many worker complaints involving disparate impact liability or LGBTQ+ workers have been sidelined by the EEOC. In her lawsuit, Cross demanded that the EEOC, which handled more than 88,000 discrimination charges in 2024, give the court a list of the disparate impact liability charges it has shut down.
The EEOC referred questions about the lawsuit to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.
Cross, who worked as a driver from August to November 2022, filed her EEOC charge two years ago, arguing that the company's delivery schedules make it nearly impossible for drivers to find time to use bathrooms. An EEOC investigator told her lawyers last month it was closing her case because of the disparate impact rule, according to the lawsuit.
Amazon declined to comment on Cross' case but referred The AP to its policies around its drivers, who deliver packages in Amazon-branded vehicles but work indirectly for the company through third-party companies called Delivery Service Partners. Amazon says its technology builds routes that ensure time for two 15-minute rest breaks and a 30-minute meal break. The company also said its Amazon Delivery app provides a list for drivers to see nearby restroom facilities and gas stations.
But in an interview with The AP, Cross said it was so hard for to her stop for breaks that she had to pack a Shewee — a portable urination device for women — as well as a change of pants “in case I ended up accidentally urinating on myself.”
Cross' lawsuit against the EEOC argues that the agency is legally obligated to investigate all charges based on disparate impact liability, which Congress codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
The EEOC “isn’t allowed to throw away an entire category of charges without looking into their facts just because the president doesn’t like the type of discrimination those charges are based on,” said Karla Gilbride, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, one of the organizations that filed the lawsuit.
Gilbride was the EEOC's general counsel until she was fired in January along with two Democratic commissioners in a purge that cleared the way for the Trump administration to root out diversity and inclusion programs, roll back protections for transgender workers and elevate religious rights. ________
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