Somewhere in Pell City, Alabama, and the towns around it, are women who applied for laborer work at a recycling plant and never heard back. By the federal government’s account, some of them were turned away as long ago as 2006, and the pattern ran until late 2022. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says the number of women potentially affected reaches into the thousands.
On July 22 the agency announced that the plant’s operator had agreed to pay $2.6 million to settle the case. The money is meant for the women who were denied those jobs. What does not yet exist is the mechanism for getting it to them, and that gap is the part worth understanding before anyone acts on the news.
The hiring pattern the EEOC traced back to 2006
The employer is TCI of Alabama, LLC, and the site is its Pell City recycling plant. According to the EEOC’s complaint, starting in 2006 when the company purchased the plant and continuing through late 2022, TCI intentionally hired only men for laborer positions and converted showers and locker rooms into male-only facilities. When the company later began outsourcing its labor staffing to third-party agencies, the agency alleges, it directed them to refer only male applicants even when qualified female candidates were available.
The suit also alleged that the practice continued after the EEOC investigated a whistleblower complaint from a long-tenured employee, whom the company terminated for telling the truth about its hiring. That retaliation case was settled separately for $90,000. The main case was filed as EEOC v. TCI of Alabama, LLC, Case No. 4:25-cv-00089-CLM, after the agency first attempted a pre-litigation settlement through conciliation.
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What the $2.6 million is for, and what has not been announced
The decree states its purpose narrowly: TCI will pay $2.6 million in monetary damages to compensate women who were denied employment. That is a settlement, not a verdict. No jury weighed the evidence, no court found the company liable, and the conduct described in the case remains an allegation that TCI resolved by agreement rather than by trial.
For a woman who thinks she may be one of the applicants, the honest answer today is that there is nothing to file. The EEOC’s announcement says only that details for the claims administration process will be announced at a later date. That means no claim form exists, no filing deadline has been set, no eligibility window has been published, and no per-person figure has been calculated or released. Dividing $2.6 million by a guess at the class size is arithmetic, not information, and this article will not print a number the agency has not published.
What a potentially affected applicant can usefully do is watch the EEOC’s newsroom for the follow-up announcement and hold on to anything showing she applied or was referred: an application confirmation, a staffing agency’s records, dates, names. Distributions in cases like this are typically built from the employer’s and the agencies’ own hiring records, which is why the administration details have to come first.
Outsourcing the hiring did not move the liability
The most instructive thread in this case is what happened to the staffing firms. TCI did not merely refuse to hire women directly; the EEOC says it routed the preference through agencies. Those agencies were not treated as bystanders. The EEOC entered into a consent decree with WorkSmart, Inc. for $150,000, and resolved a separate charge for $155,000 with Personnel Staffing, Inc.
In that April 2026 conciliation, the EEOC found that Personnel Staffing had failed to refer female temporary workers to TCI’s Pell City location between August 14, 2020 and August 1, 2023, based on TCI’s request for male-only laborers. Marsha Rucker, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Birmingham District, drew the line in the announcement of the TCI decree: employers cannot evade Title VII by outsourcing their hiring and directing staffing agencies to carry out their discriminatory preferences based on sex. For a temporary worker, the practical implication is that a referral that never comes is not automatically the agency’s fault or the client’s fault, and both can be liable.
The parts of the decree that are not money
The agreement runs three years and carries obligations beyond the payment. TCI will hire a Title VII coordinator, provide mandatory anti-discrimination training to managers and employees, notify every staffing agency it works with not to comply with any discriminatory requests, and post a notice to employees describing the settlement and how to report future discrimination. Those terms are the reason a consent decree keeps a court involved after the check is written, and the reason the EEOC characterizes it as resolving the case rather than closing it.
Why a male-only laborer job is unlawful in the first place
The EEOC’s statement of prohibited practices makes it illegal to discriminate against an applicant or an employee because of sex in every aspect of employment, and specifically illegal to publish a job advertisement showing a preference for, or discouraging, applicants of a particular sex. A preference communicated privately to a staffing agency is the same preference, and the facilities detail in the complaint shows how a hiring rule becomes physical: once the showers and locker rooms are male-only, the exclusion no longer needs a spoken policy to keep working.
Acting Birmingham District Director Linda Sales-Long stated the standard the agency applied: federal law prohibits employers from refusing to hire qualified individuals because of their sex, regardless of any sex-specific preference its owners or managers may hold.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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