We fight every day in the courts, in the legislature, and in our communities to create a Virginia for all. But we can’t do it alone.
Document Date: October 22, 2019
Efforts to prevent employment discrimination across the country are a patchwork of federal and state law protections and enforcement. At the federal level, large employers are prohibited from various types of discrimination, with enforcement efforts spearheaded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. States are left to fill in the gaps among the many federal laws with their own protections. Virginia law does not do much to fill those gaps.
In this report, we set out to answer two questions:
From all of the intakes we reviewed and our comparisons to other states, one thing is clear: employment discrimination is happening throughout Virginia, and the Commonwealth is not doing enough to combat it. We urge policymakers to take steps to provide better protections for Virginia’s employees, like strengthening our state-level anti-discrimination law, creating an independent state agency that can enforce this law, and collecting and reporting data annually. Anti-discrimination protections are too important of an area of law for Virginia to remain at the bottom of the country.
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