After reading the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) website, I was initially surprised that businesses under 15 employees (and under 20 employees for age discrimination) are not covered by the laws that the EEOC enforces. I had assumed that all business were forbidden from discriminating against a protected class, regardless of the business's size. Even if a female employee had conclusive and undeniable proof that her termination was based on her gender alone, if her company had less than 15 employees, the employer could legally get away with it. In order for a worker to be counted as an employee under EEOC law, he or she must have worked for the company for at least twenty calendar weeks (EEOC). Independent contractors and temporary employees are not covered. Employers with several worksites should count all the employees together as one company.
I had a trouble finding a clear reason on the EEOC website why the minimum cutoff is 15 employees. My best guess is that a company of that size is just too small to employ all classes of people indiscriminately. For example, a struggling five person business might go bankrupt trying to outfit their office to be wheelchair accessible. In this case I can understand how the business would have to discriminate against handicapped people when hiring. It also might be harder to employ a representative sample of the local population in a company that small. It is too easy to accuse a five person all-male company of gender discrimination. It is most likely just a coincidence that a five person company is all males, having nothing to do with overt gender discrimination. However, even if an employer is too small to be covered by the EEOC laws, the employer may still be covered by a state or local anti-discrimination laws (EEOC).
Small businesses are treated differently by the EEOC because they do not have as