The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has launched an investigation into Nike on Wednesday over alleged discrimination against white employees. The chair of the commission, Andrea Lucas, was appointed by President Donald Trump in November 2025. The investigation was triggered by the EEOC after it had subpoenaed Nike last fall.
Nike is accused of discriminating against its white employees
The agency filed a motion on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, where Nike has a factory. The charges alleged by the commission date back to 2024 when Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas said Nike had held discriminatory practices that include “race-based workforce representation quotas” and hiring, promotion, demotion and firing decisions stemming from “disparate treatment against White employees, applicants, and training program participants,” according to ABC News.
The allegations also include preferential treatment towards nonwhite employees. The EEOC cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its motion.
“Respondent NIKE’s failure to comply with the subpoena has delayed and hampered the EEOC’s investigation of alleged unlawful employment practices under Title VII” of the Civil Rights Act, the commission alleged, per ABC News.
The EEOC added that it filed the subpoena enforcement action after “first attempting to obtain voluntary compliance with its investigative requests,” NBC News reported.
The investigation wasn’t triggered by Nike workers but by the EEOC
The case was brought up by the EEOC and was based on publicly available information regarding Nike, such as the company’s annual “Impact Reports” and information on its public website. It was not triggered by potential allegations made by Nike employees.
Nike is the largest sportswear and apparel retailer in the world. With nearly 80,000 employees, it raked in around $51.4 billion in 2024, according to NBC News. It objected to various demands of the EEOC in recent months, saying that the demands for documents and information dated back before the period in question.
The motion filed this week “feels like a surprising and unusual escalation,” a Nike spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News.
“We have had extensive, good-faith participation in an EEOC inquiry into our personnel practices, programs, and decisions and have had ongoing efforts to provide information and engage constructively with the agency,” the statement continued. “We have shared thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses to the EEOC’s inquiry and are in the process of providing additional information.”
Nike is “committed to fair and lawful employment practices and follow[s] all applicable laws, including those that prohibit discrimination,” the statement added. “We believe our programs and practices are consistent with those obligations and take these matters seriously. We will continue our attempt to cooperate with the EEOC and will respond to the petition.”
