Down Payment Resource honors Mosi Gatling with its Beverly Faull Affordable Housing Leadership Award and Skyler Lemons with its inaugural Emerging Leader Award

Yahoo

2 hours ago

Yahoo

Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

Federal authorities are moving to drop a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain, part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump's administration to halt the use of a key tool for enforcing the country's civil rights laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, confirmed it has begun notifying potential claimants of its intention to drop the Sheetz lawsuit, citing Trump's executive order directing federal agencies to deprioritize the use of 'disparate impact liability' in civil rights enforcement. Disparate impact liability holds that policies that are neutral on their face can violate civil rights laws if they impose artificial barriers that disadvantage different demographic groups. The concept has been used to root out practices that close off minorities, women, people with disabilities, older adults or other groups from certain jobs, or keep them from accessing credit or equal pay. Trump's executive order is part of his campaign to upend civil rights enforcement through firings and other steps that have consolidated his power over quasi-independent agencies like the EEOC, redirecting them to implement his priorities, including stamping out diversity and inclusion practices and eroding the rights of transgender people. In the Sheetz case, filed in April 2024 under the Biden administration, the EEOC had claimed that the company's policy of refusing to hire anyone who failed its criminal background checks discriminated against Black, Native American and multiracial job applicants. The lawsuit could survive even if the EEOC drops it: The law firm Outten & Golden, which represents workers in employment disputes, and the Public Interest Law Center, filed a motion Thursday to intervene and pursue its own class action lawsuit on behalf of one of the potential claimants. What is disparate impact? The Supreme Court recognized the concept of disparate impact in a landmark 1971 case, which held that a North Carolina power plant discriminated against Black employees by requiring high school diplomas and an intelligence test for certain higher paying roles, even though the requirements were irrelevant to the jobs. In 1991, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to codify disparate impact in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The concept holds that it is illegal to impose barriers to employment if such practices have a discriminatory effect and have no relevance to the requirements of the job. What does Trump's executive order say? The April 23 order declared that it is "the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.' The order argued that disparate impact has become a 'key tool' of a 'pernicious movement' that threatens meritocracy in favor of 'racial balancing' in the workforce. Craig Leen, a former top official at the Labor Department under the first Trump administration, said while the executive order take a more aggressive approach, it reflects longstanding conservative concerns that disparate impact liability encourages the assumption that any racial imbalance in the workforce is a result of discrimination. Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said the order reverses 'a trend of bad law and bad policy in prior administrations.' She said the Trump administration would rightfully 'focus on individual discrimination cases," which she said are "more factually sound, less susceptible to manipulation, and more closely hews to the original intent' of civil rights law. What is happening with the Sheetz case? The EEOC filed the original Sheetz lawsuit after an eight-year investigation that arose from complaints filed by two job applicants. Both Republican EEOC commissioners at the time voted against bringing the lawsuit, while the three Democrats voted in favor. In an email to The Associated Press, an EEOC spokesperson confirmed the agency has began notifying potential claimants that it would file a motion to dismiss the case but declined to comment further. One of the potential claimants, Kenni Miller, filed a motion to intervene Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. U.S. workers can pursue federal discrimination lawsuits on their own if the EEOC declines to take up their complaints but often don't because of the resources required. Miller, a Black man, was hired as a shift supervisor at a Sheetz in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 2020. After working there for a month, Miller was told he failed the background check because of a felony drug conviction and was let go, according to the motion. According to the EEOC's lawsuit, Sheetz' policy of denying jobs who anyone who failed a background check resulted in 14.5% Black job applicants being denied employment, compared to 8% of white applicants. For Native American applicants, the rate was 13%, and for multiracial applicants, it was 13.5%. In court filings, Sheetz denied the allegations. Attorneys for the company, which is being represented by the law firm Littler, declined to comment further. The EEOC has not said how many potential claimants have been identified. Christopher McNerney, an Outten & Golden attorney who is representing Miller, said the number is likely in the thousands. Sheetz has more than 20,000 employees and operate at least 700 brand-store locations in Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to court documents. What other cases have leveraged disparate impact liability? The Sheetz case echoes a 2018 lawsuit against Target claiming that the retailer's hiring process, which automatically rejected people with criminal backgrounds, disproportionately kept Black and Hispanic applicants from getting entry level jobs. Target agreed to pay more than $3.7 million to settle the lawsuit, and revised its policy so fewer applicants with criminal records would be disqualified. In 2020, Walmart agreed to pay $20 million and discontinue a pre-employment strength test that the EEOC had claimed in a lawsuit unfairly excluded women from jobs at grocery distribution centers. And in one of the biggest sex discrimination cases in recent years, Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of Jared and Kay Jewelers, agreed in 2022 to pay $175 million to settle a long-fought lawsuit alleging that some 68,000 women had been subjected for years to unfair pay and promotion practices. What's the potential fallout of scrapping disparate impact? The Justice Department, EEOC and other federal agencies have moved quickly to quash the use of disparate impact liability. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, for example, has moved to dismiss several Biden-era lawsuits against police departments in Kentucky and Minnesota, saying the cases claimed patterns of unconstitutional policing practices 'by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination.' In a May memo to employers, EEOC Acting Chief Andrea Lucas said the agency would deprioritize disparate impact cases, meaning that worker complaints such as the original two that triggered the Sheetz lawsuit are unlikely to be investigated. She also warned companies against using demographic data, which large companies are required gather and submit annually to the EEOC, to justify policies that favor any employees based on race or sex, something Lucas has long argued many well-intentioned DEI policies do in violation of Title VII. Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chair now with Outten & Golden, said the pullback on federal enforcement of disparate impact risks dissuading companies from proactively examining hiring and other practices to ensure they do not discriminate. At the same time, Yang and nine other former Democratic EEOC commissioners and counsels have released a letter to employers emphasizing that the Trump's order does not change the law, and to expect private practices to redouble efforts to bring disparate impact claims. "Employers should not expect that they will have a free pass on disparate impact liability simply because the President has instructed federal agencies not to pursue enforcement of the law," wrote the former EEOC officials. ________ The Associated Press' women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at

As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni's Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon

Eater

2 hours ago

Eater

As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni's Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon

Take a moment to imagine it: the rich, woody scents of smoked turkey, bison ribs, and whole antelope cooked low and slow wafting down Franklin Avenue. If all goes well, the Twin Cities won't have to fantasize about it. Chef Sean Sherman's latest project, Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni, aims to bring Indigenous barbecue to the neighborhood very soon. It's part of a series of big moves for Sherman's nonprofit organization NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems). Just last week, the organization announced that the Indigenous Food Lab market and learning space in Midtown Global Market is closing on Saturday, June 7, in preparation for their move to 2601 Franklin Avenue South, a building formerly known at the old Seward Creamery Co-op Building — now reclaimed and renamed as the Woyute Thipi Building — where Šhotá will also reside. Meanwhile, Sherman has plans in the works to expand the presence of Indigenous Food Labs in the very near future beyond the confines of Minnesota to Bozeman, Montana, and Anchorage, Alaska. Sherman, who came to prominence under the name the Sioux Chef, and his collaborative projects Indigenous Food Lab and NATIFS have played a major role in not only elevating the stories and experiences of Indigenous people and foodways in the United States but also in pushing forward efforts to improve access to culturally specific foods for Indigenous communities in Minnesota. Each expansion and project plays a role in promoting and deepening that work. 'Barbecue, at its foundation, is really Black and Indigenous' Šhotá gets its name from the phrase Mni Sóta Makoce, which in the Dakota language means 'the place where the clouds live in the water' or 'smoky water,' evoking the essence of smoked meats. Sherman says that NATIFS is still working on its 'last bits of fundraising and financing,' but anticipates that construction will begin in July on the barbecue restaurant. ('You have to be a little bit scrappy, it might take a little bit longer. We'll just kind of see where it lands,' he says.) The space just needs a facelift, he says, nothing major. Then, hopefully, it will be open in late 2025 or early 2026. Like his James Beard Award-winning restaurant on the river, Owamni, Šhotá will be run by NATIFS, and utilize decolonized ingredients. That means no dairy, flour, sugar, beef, pork, or chicken. Instead, Šhotá will serve smoked game meats such as elk, bison, and turkey, along with gluten-free cornbread, baked beans using native beans and maple syrup, and sweet potatoes. 'We're not doing whole hogs or anything, but I could see us doing a whole antelope or a whole venison,' says Sherman, adding that he's excited to potentially experiment with meats like possum, iguana, and javelina. 'We want it to feel like a barbecue concept at heart, of course. It's just going to be in our style, which is healthy Indigenous food,' he says. 'We're not using syrupy barbecue sauces made with tons of sugar, but overall, it'll be a concept that people really will understand.' The restaurant is also an opportunity for Sherman to highlight the connection between Black and Indigenous foodways. 'Barbecue, at its foundation, is really Black and Indigenous.' Sherman's been consulting with fellow James Beard Award-winner, pitmaster Rodney Scott, and hopes exciting partnerships are down the line. Culinary figures like José Andrés, René Redzepi, and Jacques Pépin, have lent support, along with public figures like former Secretary of the Interior and 2026 New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland (a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe) and actor LeVar Burton. It's important for Sherman to make sure NATIFS owns its own spaces when it can — a principle of the Land Back Movement. He bought the Seward Creamery Co-op building partly because it was along the American Indian Cultural Corridor, a prominent eight-block stretch where Sherman wants to create an anchor for Indigenous businesses. It was also a good opportunity to rename the building, he says. Now called Wóyute Thipi, meaning 'food building' in Dakota, the former Seward Creamery Co-op was named for William Henry Seward, President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869. It was during that administration that Lincoln ordered the executions of 38 Dakota warriors in what is now Mankato, Minnesota — the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Seward also oversaw the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, a sale of stolen land that further degraded Indigenous sovereignty. 'So his name doesn't need to be on the building. Not at all,' Sherman says. Since launching the Sioux Chef in 2014, Sherman and his nonprofit have had the wind at their backs with new projects and collaborations. This spring, he published a new cookbook, Turtle Island , a follow-up to his James Beard Award-winning The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen . But now, Sherman is about to embark on one of his biggest projects yet, making good on a long-stewing vision to increase Indigenous representation in the dining industry and access to decolonized foods for tribal communities, not just within the U.S., but all over North America by expanding Indigenous Food Lab locations. Sherman plans to open up another Indigenous Food Lab location in Bozeman, Montana, ideally in late 2025 or early 2026. Sherman says they're getting ready to hire for a regional position who will manage the Montana expansion as a NATIFS employee, but with a lot of freedom to build their own team. Like its Twin Cities location, the Bozeman Indigenous Food Lab will offer food made by Indigenous makers like beans, wild rice, juniper ash, maple syrup, roasted crickets, kelp hot sauce, and teas, alongside game meats like elk and bison. Additionally, it will feature a counter serving tacos and grain bowls. The Bozeman branch will also process and ship wholesale Indigenous foods across the state to tribal communities for greater access to healthy, ancestral, culturally specific foods. Space will be provided for Indigenous food creators to make educational videos and hold cooking classes. Eventually, Sherman says, they'll open up a full-service restaurant in Bozeman. 'That's where the job creation and product movement will really come in. We'll be able to push a ton of food dollars to the producers we want to support. And it'll drive people to be proud and aware of having this Indigenous-focused restaurant in their community.' NATIFS is also planning to expand the Indigenous Food Lab to Anchorage, Alaska. NATIFS outreach manager, Rob Kinneen, is an Alaska native from the Tlingit tribe and his connections are playing a vital role in establishing the new location. Sherman is hoping for partnerships with community organizations like the Alaska Native Medical Center and the Alaska Native Heritage Center. 'Our goal was to build a nonprofit that was replicable so that we could expand and create support systems in regions everywhere.' Sherman would also like to add a location in Rapid City, South Dakota; it's a site that's especially important to him because it's closer to Pine Ridge Reservation, the fourth largest Native American reservation within U.S. borders. Pine Ridge also happens to be where he grew up. Other potential sites are also on the horizon: 'We have people in Seattle, Portland, parts of California that are very interested in us. I could see us easily in Albuquerque or Phoenix, and definitely someplace in the Northeast, although I'm not really sure which would be the best pinpoint out there.' He aims to expand past colonial borders and build deeper partnerships with Indigenous communities in Canada and Mexico. For Sherman, the importance of Indigenous solidarity expands past even this continent. 'I just want to go beyond because we're creating these really strong connections in South America, west and south Africa, and Australia, and New Zealand. There's a lot of opportunity to grow internationally in the future.' Related Brunch, Decolonized The biggest challenge, Sherman reiterates, is solidifying funding to grow their staff and start project rollouts. 'We're so close. I was trying to raise six million just to launch this space [for Šhotá], and I still have about one million left, which is not bad for starting in January. But I still have some ways to go.' Sherman's dreams are sky-high even in the best of climates, but it's hard to ignore that the Trump administration's budget cuts to DEI initiatives at universities, environmental programs, projects aimed at reducing racial inequities, and tribal programs might make Sherman's plans difficult, even though NATIFS doesn't rely too much on government funds. Still, Sherman has hope in NATIFS and its partners' abilities to weather the storm and keep creating transformative projects. 'It's not a friendly environment for people of color under this administration. But regardless of who is in office, the work remains the same, and we're going to keep doing it.' Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni is headed to 2601 Franklin Avenue, planned for a late 2025 or early 2026 opening. Sign up for our newsletter.

San Francisco Chronicle

2 hours ago

San Francisco Chronicle

Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

Federal authorities are moving to drop a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain, part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump's administration to halt the use of a key tool for enforcing the country's civil rights laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, confirmed it has begun notifying potential claimants of its intention to drop the Sheetz lawsuit, citing Trump's executive order directing federal agencies to deprioritize the use of 'disparate impact liability' in civil rights enforcement. Disparate impact liability holds that policies that are neutral on their face can violate civil rights laws if they impose artificial barriers that disadvantage different demographic groups. The concept has been used to root out practices that close off minorities, women, people with disabilities, older adults or other groups from certain jobs, or keep them from accessing credit or equal pay. Trump's executive order is part of his campaign to upend civil rights enforcement through firings and other steps that have consolidated his power over quasi-independent agencies like the EEOC, redirecting them to implement his priorities, including stamping out diversity and inclusion practices and eroding the rights of transgender people. In the Sheetz case, filed in April 2024 under the Biden administration, the EEOC had claimed that the company's policy of refusing to hire anyone who failed its criminal background checks discriminated against Black, Native American and multiracial job applicants. The lawsuit could survive even if the EEOC drops it: The law firm Outten & Golden, which represents workers in employment disputes, and the Public Interest Law Center, filed a motion Thursday to intervene and pursue its own class action lawsuit on behalf of one of the potential claimants. What is disparate impact? The Supreme Court recognized the concept of disparate impact in a landmark 1971 case, which held that a North Carolina power plant discriminated against Black employees by requiring high school diplomas and an intelligence test for certain higher paying roles, even though the requirements were irrelevant to the jobs. In 1991, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to codify disparate impact in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The concept holds that it is illegal to impose barriers to employment if such practices have a discriminatory effect and have no relevance to the requirements of the job. What does Trump's executive order say? The April 23 order declared that it is "the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.' The order argued that disparate impact has become a 'key tool' of a 'pernicious movement' that threatens meritocracy in favor of 'racial balancing' in the workforce. Craig Leen, a former top official at the Labor Department under the first Trump administration, said while the executive order take a more aggressive approach, it reflects longstanding conservative concerns that disparate impact liability encourages the assumption that any racial imbalance in the workforce is a result of discrimination. Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said the order reverses 'a trend of bad law and bad policy in prior administrations.' She said the Trump administration would rightfully 'focus on individual discrimination cases," which she said are "more factually sound, less susceptible to manipulation, and more closely hews to the original intent' of civil rights law. What is happening with the Sheetz case? The EEOC filed the original Sheetz lawsuit after an eight-year investigation that arose from complaints filed by two job applicants. Both Republican EEOC commissioners at the time voted against bringing the lawsuit, while the three Democrats voted in favor. In an email to The Associated Press, an EEOC spokesperson confirmed the agency has began notifying potential claimants that it would file a motion to dismiss the case but declined to comment further. One of the potential claimants, Kenni Miller, filed a motion to intervene Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. U.S. workers can pursue federal discrimination lawsuits on their own if the EEOC declines to take up their complaints but often don't because of the resources required. Miller, a Black man, was hired as a shift supervisor at a Sheetz in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 2020. After working there for a month, Miller was told he failed the background check because of a felony drug conviction and was let go, according to the motion. According to the EEOC's lawsuit, Sheetz' policy of denying jobs who anyone who failed a background check resulted in 14.5% Black job applicants being denied employment, compared to 8% of white applicants. For Native American applicants, the rate was 13%, and for multiracial applicants, it was 13.5%. In court filings, Sheetz denied the allegations. Attorneys for the company, which is being represented by the law firm Littler, declined to comment further. The EEOC has not said how many potential claimants have been identified. Christopher McNerney, an Outten & Golden attorney who is representing Miller, said the number is likely in the thousands. Sheetz has more than 20,000 employees and operate at least 700 brand-store locations in Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to court documents. What other cases have leveraged disparate impact liability? The Sheetz case echoes a 2018 lawsuit against Target claiming that the retailer's hiring process, which automatically rejected people with criminal backgrounds, disproportionately kept Black and Hispanic applicants from getting entry level jobs. Target agreed to pay more than $3.7 million to settle the lawsuit, and revised its policy so fewer applicants with criminal records would be disqualified. In 2020, Walmart agreed to pay $20 million and discontinue a pre-employment strength test that the EEOC had claimed in a lawsuit unfairly excluded women from jobs at grocery distribution centers. And in one of the biggest sex discrimination cases in recent years, Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of Jared and Kay Jewelers, agreed in 2022 to pay $175 million to settle a long-fought lawsuit alleging that some 68,000 women had been subjected for years to unfair pay and promotion practices. What's the potential fallout of scrapping disparate impact? The Justice Department, EEOC and other federal agencies have moved quickly to quash the use of disparate impact liability. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, for example, has moved to dismiss several Biden-era lawsuits against police departments in Kentucky and Minnesota, saying the cases claimed patterns of unconstitutional policing practices 'by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination.' In a May memo to employers, EEOC Acting Chief Andrea Lucas said the agency would deprioritize disparate impact cases, meaning that worker complaints such as the original two that triggered the Sheetz lawsuit are unlikely to be investigated. She also warned companies against using demographic data, which large companies are required gather and submit annually to the EEOC, to justify policies that favor any employees based on race or sex, something Lucas has long argued many well-intentioned DEI policies do in violation of Title VII. Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chair now with Outten & Golden, said the pullback on federal enforcement of disparate impact risks dissuading companies from proactively examining hiring and other practices to ensure they do not discriminate. At the same time, Yang and nine other former Democratic EEOC commissioners and counsels have released a letter to employers emphasizing that the Trump's order does not change the law, and to expect private practices to redouble efforts to bring disparate impact claims. "Employers should not expect that they will have a free pass on disparate impact liability simply because the President has instructed federal agencies not to pursue enforcement of the law," wrote the former EEOC officials. ________

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Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni's Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon

Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

Down Payment Resource honors Mosi Gatling with its Beverly Faull Affordable Housing Leadership Award and Skyler Lemons with its inaugural Emerging Leader Award

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Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni's Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon

Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool

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