What Happens After Someone Files a Charge Against Your Shop

Why this matters

An envelope arrives naming your shop as Respondent, and the most common first move is the worst one available: a long, unreviewed letter explaining what kind of employee this person really was. That letter becomes your position statement, the position statement becomes the spine of the file, and every sentence in it that a payroll record or a dispatch log later contradicts is a credibility hit you handed over for free. A charge is not a lawsuit and it is not a verdict. It is the opening of a fairly rigid pipeline with published clocks, and the shops that get out of it cheaply are the ones who understood the pipeline before they wrote anything down.

What follows is how that process runs. It is orientation, not legal advice about your own matter, and three points below are marked where the honest instruction is to stop and hand it to an employment lawyer.

What a charge is, and where it lands

A charge is a sworn allegation filed with a government agency, not a complaint filed in court. Federally that agency is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nearly every state also runs a fair employment practices agency, and most have a work-sharing agreement with the EEOC, so one filing is treated as filed with both. The employee picks a door; you answer to whichever agency takes the file first.

Coverage decides whether the federal statute is even in play. At the federal layer, Title VII (42 U.S.C. 2000e) and the Americans with Disabilities Act reach employers with 15 or more employees; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act reaches 20 or more (29 U.S.C. 630(b)). The state layer routinely reaches much smaller shops, which is where a small crew actually gets caught: California's Fair Employment and Housing Act applies at five employees and its harassment provisions reach an employer with one, and Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act has no headcount threshold at all. A six-person shop that reads the federal threshold and concludes it is not covered has answered the wrong question.

The clocks, theirs and yours

Their filing clock. Under Title VII an employee has 180 days from the act complained of, extended to 300 days where a state or local fair employment agency has jurisdiction, which is the situation in most of the country (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(e)(1)). A small number of states have no fair employment agency of general jurisdiction, Alabama and Mississippi among them, and the 180-day figure is the live one there. State deadlines can be far longer: California allows three years to file with its Civil Rights Department under Government Code 12960.

Your notice clock. Title VII requires the Commission to serve notice of the charge on the employer within ten days of filing (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(b)). What arrives is the charge itself plus a request for a position statement, and the EEOC's standard request gives 30 days. One extension for cause is common; a second is not.

Your preservation clock starts the moment you know. Under 29 CFR 1602.14 an employer must keep all personnel records relevant to a charge until final disposition, and that duty attaches on notice, not on a court order. So the deletion rules you normally run stop for this person and for anyone comparable: emails, texts, dispatch and GPS records, time records, the schedule, the write-ups. A routine purge that runs on schedule after you had notice is the worst fact in the file, because it is the one thing that needs no witness.

The position statement decides more than the investigation does

This is the single most consequential document in the process and it is written earliest, when you know least. The investigator reads it first, frames the requests for information around it, and reads every later document against it. Since 2016 the agency provides the respondent's position statement and its non-confidential attachments to the charging party on request and gives them a window to reply, and that reply is not shared back with you, so you are writing for a reader who will be invited to contradict you in detail. Confidential material therefore has to go in separately labeled attachments, because anything in the body is disclosable: sensitive medical information, confidential commercial information, and the personal information of other employees. And a statement that asserts facts without producing the documents behind them reads as unsupported, so the exhibits are the statement and the narrative is the cover.

The two failure modes are opposite and equally common. One is the kitchen sink: every grievance the owner ever had, half of it undocumented, which hands the investigator a pile of claims to test and a shop that cannot support them. The other is the shrug, a three-paragraph denial with nothing attached, which reads as a shop with no records. The correct shape is narrow: the decision, who made it, when, on what evidence, and the contemporaneous documents that were in front of that person at the time. The record standard that makes those documents worth attaching is owned by the performance-documentation card in the References, not re-derived here.

Stop here and get a lawyer. This is the first of the three points. Your response is the document the agency reads first and the one a plaintiff's counsel reads later, and it is very hard to walk back.

What the agency can ask for, and what it does with it

After the position statement the investigator issues a request for information: the personnel files of the charging party and of the comparators (people outside the protected group who did the same thing and were treated differently), payroll and time records, the policy that governs the conduct at issue, the complaint procedure and any complaints made under it, and who was present. On-site visits and witness interviews happen in a minority of charges but are routine where the allegation is harassment.

Two mechanics matter to a small shop. The agency can interview your non-management employees without your counsel present, and it will tell them so; managers speak for the employer and are handled differently. And the comparator question is where most small-shop charges turn, because a shop of nine has few comparators and the file either shows that the other tech who did the same thing got the same treatment or it does not. That is a records question, not an intent question.

Retaliation is the other thing that goes wrong here, usually without anybody deciding to retaliate. Schedules get adjusted to reduce friction, the good overtime quietly stops, the person drops off the group text. Each is an adverse action in the ordinary sense, and the resulting claim is separate from and often stronger than the original. See the retaliation card in the References.

Mediation, and the honest argument both ways

The EEOC offers mediation early, at no cost, confidentially, with no admission of liability, and both sides have to agree to it.

The case for taking it is that the process costs you regardless of who is right: counsel time, the owner's time, the crew talking about it, and a year of exposure all come off whether the charge has merit or not, and mediation converts an open-ended liability into a known number now. The case against deserves stating just as plainly: a shop that settles a charge it believes is meritless has bought a quiet year and a reputation among a crew of nine that a complaint pays. Where the conduct alleged genuinely did not happen and the file shows it, there is a real argument for taking the no-cause finding, and that call belongs with counsel rather than with feeling.

How it ends, and what each ending means

• Dismissal and notice of rights, commonly called a no-cause finding. The agency did not find reasonable cause. It is not a judgment in your favor and it does not bind a court; the charging party can still sue.
• A cause finding. The agency concluded there is reasonable cause to believe the law was violated, and the matter moves to conciliation, which is a negotiated resolution attempt. If conciliation fails, the EEOC may sue or, more often for a shop this size, issue a right to sue and step back.
• Right to sue. Either ending produces one, and the charging party can also request one after 180 days without waiting for a determination. It starts a hard 90-day window to file in federal court (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(f)(1)). That window closing without a filing is the real end of the matter.

Two things to hold while you wait. Title VII compensatory and punitive damages are capped by employer headcount under 42 U.S.C. 1981a(b)(3), the lowest band covering employers of 15 to 100 employees, and that cap does not reach back pay; state statutes frequently have no cap at all. And the better part of a year at the federal agency is normal, longer is common, so plan the shop around that rather than around a resolution next month.

Worked example: fourteen months from the envelope

A nine-person plumbing shop terminates a technician on March 3 for repeated no-shows, with two write-ups in the file, both undated. The tech files with the state agency on December 12, which is 284 days after the termination: outside the 180-day window, inside the 300-day one, so the charge stands.

Notice arrives December 20 with a position statement due January 19, 30 days out. The owner drafts a five-page letter about attitude; counsel cuts it to two pages built around the two write-ups, and that is where the file's weakness surfaces. Undated write-ups cannot be tied to the dispatch records that would corroborate the no-shows, so the exhibits go in as the dispatch log plus the payroll record showing the missed days, with the write-ups secondary. A request for information lands in March asking for the files of the other two techs disciplined for attendance in the prior two years. One of them, outside the charging party's protected group, missed a comparable number of days and was never written up at all. That single fact is the charge.

The agency offers mediation in May. The shop declines on the view that the termination was genuinely about attendance, and takes a no-cause dismissal in November, eleven months after filing. The right to sue issues with it, and the 90 days run out in February, fourteen months after the envelope, with no suit filed.

The shop won and the cost was still real: roughly three days of the owner's time, counsel through two submissions, and eleven months of overhang. The comparator gap that nearly lost it was created two years earlier by not writing up a good employee for the same thing the difficult one did, which costs nothing at the time and is the exhibit a plaintiff looks for first.

How to verify you handled it right

Run these against your own file, not from memory. Every routine deletion job touching this person or any comparator is suspended, and you can name the date. Every factual assertion in the position statement has an exhibit behind it, and confidential material sits in labeled attachments rather than in the narrative. Nobody's schedule, route, overtime or standing changed after the notice arrived, and where something did change you can show it was decided and documented before. And you can name the two or three comparators an investigator will ask about, with what happened to each.

The other two lawyer stops. Before any interview of your managers, and before any settlement or mediation position, take the personnel file, the dated write-ups, the payroll and dispatch records, and the names of everyone in the room to an employment lawyer. Those two moments and the position statement are where an article stops being useful and a licensed opinion about your own state starts.

References

• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charge processing, position statement procedures and mediation program
• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq., including 2000e-5(b), 2000e-5(e)(1) and 2000e-5(f)(1); damages caps at 42 U.S.C. 1981a(b)(3)
• 29 CFR 1602.14, retention of personnel records relevant to a charge
• See related: Documenting Performance So a Termination Holds Up; How to Fire an Employee the Right Way; the retaliation and workplace-investigation cards in this category