Is it unfair if an organization that focuses on selecting up and transporting heavy hundreds emphasizes hiring youthful folks over using senior residents? That is the federal authorities’s place within the case of Meathead Movers, a California enterprise that payments itself as providing “athlete movers” who’re “clean-cut, sturdy, and professionally-trained.” The federal Equal Employment Alternative Fee (EEOC) has spent years investigating the corporate for age discrimination and even filed a uncommon agency-initiated lawsuit towards the corporate with no particular person plaintiff claiming hurt. Now, Arizona’s Goldwater Institute is suing the EEOC to seek out out what’s behind the federal paperwork’s anti-meathead jihad.
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“The U.S. Equal Employment Alternative Fee (EEOC) has filed swimsuit towards the San Luis Obispo transferring firm Meathead Movers, Inc., the most important impartial transferring firm in California, for refusing to rent folks primarily based on age,” the federal paperwork boasted in September of 2023. “The EEOC’s lawsuit fees that since not less than 2017, Meathead Movers didn’t recruit and rent candidates over 40 into transferring, packing and customer support positions. Meathead maintains a sample or apply of recruiting and hiring younger faculty college students, deliberately excluding older employees no matter their particular person talents.”
Based in 1997 by two then-high faculty athletes, Aaron and Evan Steed, the corporate has grown into California’s largest impartial transferring firm primarily based on the what the firm describes as “the brothers’ imaginative and prescient of energetic athletes delivering a singular customer support expertise.”
A 2017 profile in Inc. journal described the corporate’s evolution into not only a bigger and extra profitable transferring firm, however a launch pad for younger athletes. Meathead Movers “hires pupil athletes with bold profession objectives and helps them obtain these objectives by means of teaching, coaching, and confidence constructing. When staff begin their postgraduation job searches, founder Aaron Steed proactively calls hiring managers to sing their praises.” To that finish, the profile added, “the enterprise recruits its 350-plus movers–largely wrestlers, in addition to soccer and baseball gamers–from faculties in southern and central California.”
The method has followers. This 12 months, Pacific Coast Enterprise Occasions surveyed 1,400 staff at nearly 100 firms and named Meathead Movers among the many “2025 Central Coast Finest Locations to Work.”
This implies the corporate’s founders constructed a rising transferring enterprise that is well-liked amongst its staff (and presumably the shoppers who’ve pushed that progress) by hiring sturdy younger folks to pack, carry, and transport heavy objects whereas they’re within the prime of health. It trains them for the bigger work world after transferring after which launches them. Then it hires extra.
That is type of a cool enterprise mannequin. However the feds do not prefer it. They started investigating Meathead Movers roughly a decade in the past. Then they slapped the corporate with a demand for $15 million and modifications in its inner practices to settle the EEOC’s age-discrimination claims.
“We after all mentioned, ‘sorry, we won’t afford that’ and I am by no means going to comply with exit of enterprise,” Meathead Movers CEO Aaron Steed objects in a video posted to Fb. “From there, we had three mediations, all of which failed. I agreed to all of the non-monetary calls for: altering our coaching, altering the wording in our slogan, every kind of issues. And nonetheless, they wished an eight-figure settlement which might have bankrupted my firm.”
The EEOC did not like Steed going public, so it instructed the corporate to close up. Meathead Movers would not be allowed to share its ordeal or its aspect of the story with the general public.
“The EEOC issued a gag order demanding that Aaron and his firm stop all public communication—together with social media posts—concerning the case, underneath menace of further authorized motion,” in accordance to the Goldwater Institute, which is now concerned within the case. “In different phrases, the federal government is now trampling on the First Modification rights of the corporate’s founder, just because it does not like that the corporate is sharing the reality concerning the authorities’s actions on this case.”
Apparently, the EEOC is not backing a lawsuit filed by aggrieved present or former staff—it is nonetheless trawling for anyone with an axe to grind towards Meathead Movers on the company’s web site, desperately searching for “people aged 40 or older who utilized to Meathead and imagine they weren’t employed due to their age.” Within the absence of anyone with a criticism, the EEOC launched its personal lawsuit primarily based on its distaste for the corporate’s philosophy and enterprise practices.
“Throughout the EEOC, no present or former worker has ever filed an age discrimination declare towards Meathead Movers,” famous Dylan Foreman of native NBC affiliate KSBY in a March story concerning the case. “The EEOC has filed solely eight lawsuits primarily based by itself initiated investigations inside the final 10 years throughout all statutes and in all federal courts throughout the whole nation.”
The EEOC admits that even wanting lawsuits, “directed investigations” within the absence of complaints by aggrieved people are uncommon and represent “far lower than 1%” of its quantity.
That makes the continuing campaign towards this transferring firm extremely uncommon. Federal bureaucrats are going out of their approach to torment a enterprise—CEO Aaron Steed says the corporate has run up $1.5 million in authorized prices thus far—within the absence of any aggrieved events aside from themselves.
The Tri-County Chamber Alliance, representing chambers of commerce in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, calls the case towards Meathead Movers “a surprising authorities shakedown by the Equal Employment Alternative Fee.”
Frankly, it appears like a private vendetta or a success job. It is actually one thing value wanting into. And that is precisely what the Goldwater Institute is now doing.
Final week, after federal bureaucrats ignored a public information request on behalf of Meathead Movers, Goldwater filed a lawsuit towards the EEOC searching for “information pertaining to the full variety of complaints towards Meathead Movers, publicly-available details about the EEOC’s investigation of Meathead Movers, details about different agency-initiated lawsuits, together with allegations of age discrimination, and communications about Meathead Movers, together with to and from particular EEOC officers.”
Perhaps with the assistance of the Goldwater Institute, Meathead Movers will lastly uncover why federal bureaucrats need to drive the corporate out of enterprise.
