The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has rescinded its long-standing enforcement guidance on how employers may use arrest and conviction records when making hiring decisions. The commission voted 2-1 behind closed doors on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, to repeal the guidance, according to an agency statement reported by Bloomberg Law, with Democratic commissioner Kalpana Kotagal voting against the Republican majority. Law360 separately reported on Thursday that the agency had announced the revocation of the guidance outlining employers' legal obligations in their use of workers' arrest and conviction records.
Source: Bloomberg Law
The commission said the elimination of the guidance is effective immediately. The document — formally the Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — was first issued in 1987 and was last updated in 2012, when it tackled hiring policies and practices that may have an unintentional discriminatory impact on people of color, Bloomberg Law reported. A public meeting the EEOC had planned for Friday to discuss scrapping the guidance was cancelled once the vote had taken place, Law360 reported.
What the guidance actually told employers
The guidance never banned background checks, and it never said employers could not consider a conviction. What it said was that an arrest alone does not establish that criminal conduct occurred, and that excluding applicants because of a criminal record had to be job-related and consistent with business necessity if the policy was not to violate Title VII. It pointed employers to the long-used factors drawn from the courts — the nature and gravity of the offence, the time that has passed since the offence or the completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job being sought — and it recommended a targeted screen followed by an individualised assessment of the applicant. Its core warning was about disparate impact: a neutral rule, such as 'no one with any record is hired,' could fall hardest on Black and Hispanic applicants and so break federal anti-discrimination law even where no intent to discriminate existed.
How the rescission happened
The vote is the latest step in a broader federal retreat from disparate-impact enforcement. On April 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14281, which declared a policy of eliminating disparate-impact liability to the maximum degree possible and directed agencies to deprioritise it. Employment-law analyses of the EEOC's course since then describe the agency directing staff to close nearly all pending charges based solely on disparate impact, a Justice Department opinion in June 2026 concluding that the EEOC's disparate-impact interpretations of Title VII were unlawful, and the commission's vote on June 30, 2026, to rescind its longstanding affirmative-action guidelines. On October 6, 2026, the EEOC sent a draft final rule rescinding the criminal-records guidance to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review — and within the month, the commission voted the guidance out altogether rather than waiting for a public process.
Title VII itself is untouched. Disparate-impact liability was codified by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and recognised by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and no agency guidance document can remove it. Applicants and employees who go through the EEOC charge process can still take disparate-impact claims to court themselves, the Fair Credit Reporting Act still governs how third-party background checks are run, and state and local fair-chance hiring laws remain in force.
An old legal fight over the guidance
The guidance had been legally contested for years before this vote. Texas challenged it, arguing the state should be able to refuse to hire convicted felons without further consideration, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked the EEOC from enforcing the guidance against Texas, holding that the agency had exceeded its authority by treating the document as binding. Critics of the guidance argued it effectively imposed obligations on employers without the notice-and-comment rulemaking the Administrative Procedure Act requires — an argument the rescission now makes moot at the federal level.
Why this matters for truckers and diaspora jobseekers
Few industries screen criminal history as routinely as trucking, warehousing and logistics — the sectors in which a large share of the Punjabi diaspora in the United States earns its living, from Central Valley freight yards in California to warehouses in New Jersey, Texas and Illinois. Driving jobs add their own federal and insurance-driven record checks on top of employer policies. The practical effect of the rescission is not that records no longer matter — they matter as much as ever to an employer — but that the federal agency is now far less likely to bring a disparate-impact case against a company whose blanket ban shuts out everyone with a record, including applicants whose offences are old or unrelated to the job. Employment-law firms analysing the move expect the EEOC to keep pursuing disparate-treatment cases — where an employer is accused of treating one applicant more harshly than another because of a protected characteristic — while leaving disparate-impact challenges largely to private lawsuits.
Under Republican Chair Andrea Lucas, the EEOC has steadily turned away from unintentional-discrimination claims, Bloomberg Law reported, and the criminal-records guidance — one of the clearest documents built on that theory — was a named target of the administration's 2025 executive order. For jobseekers, the change also removes the document many applicants and advocates used to cite when asking an employer to look at the age and relevance of an old conviction rather than applying an automatic rejection.
What happens next
The rescission is effective immediately and, based on past practice, employment lawyers do not expect the EEOC to issue replacement guidance on criminal background checks. Law firms advising employers are warning clients not to treat the vote as a green light: Title VII liability survives in court, the EEOC can still pursue intentional-discrimination claims, and blanket exclusions and arrest-only disqualifications remain the most litigation-prone hiring practices. The questions to watch are how the agency handles charges already in its system that rest on disparate-impact theory, and whether applicants with old records now take blanket-ban cases to court themselves — the one route this week's vote did not close.