Several subsidiaries of North American Stamping Group (NASG), a major international car-parts manufacturer, will pay $620,000 and submit to two years of EEOC monitoring to settle a sex harassment and discrimination lawsuit tied to its Portland, Tennessee facilities. The agency alleged that from 2018 through 2025, NASG limited promotional opportunities for more than a dozen women, discouraged them from joining apprenticeship programs, and failed to adequately respond to sexual harassment complaints that included unwanted sexual attention and demeaning, sex-based remarks.
The consent decree resolving the case requires NASG to train certain employees on sex discrimination, post notice of the settlement at the affected facilities, report sex discrimination complaints to the EEOC regularly for two years, and put in place stronger anti-discrimination personnel policies. “Denying employment opportunities to workers in industrial settings because of their sex is illegal, and the EEOC remains vigilant in opposing sex discrimination based on sex stereotypes and sexual harassment in the workplace,” said Christopher Lage, acting EEOC general counsel.
The case lands in the same week HRTech covered a religious accommodation suit against a different employer and a small employer facing the same EEOC playbook as larger companies, and the pattern across all three is instructive: the EEOC is applying an identical enforcement template, mandatory training, monitoring, and reporting, regardless of company size or sector. For HR teams in manufacturing and other industrial settings with historically male-dominated shop floors, the apprenticeship-access allegation is the detail worth flagging internally now. Blocking women from apprenticeship pipelines is a promotion-pathway problem as much as a harassment problem, and it is the kind of structural gap that shows up in a consent decree years after the access was first denied, not the year it happened.
Source: EEOC
