I was part of a team that litigated a case similar to this with a Government employee.
Up front, I'm not defending the law here. I actually think this is utterly retarded and I frequently use this experience to explain why.
It was a close enough case that we could ethically take the Client's money and take a shot, but we advised him repeatedly his chances of ultimate success weren't fantastic.
The Client was *constantly* late. He would also just not show up at least once a week. This happened for years. Because he was a Federal employee and a member of a Union, they couldn't punish him straight out. In fact, because of these measures, they could hardly ever punish anyone.
We were able to survive a Motion for Summary Judgment exclusively on the fact that the Agency never punished anyone for being late or missing work. Now, the Client was far worse than anyone else by a factor of at least 10, but this simple evidence was enough to trigger a presumption of racial bias under Title VII of the CRA.
Now, we knew we weren't succeeding at trial. The firm I worked for always did focus groups, and the Client's case was not popular with them. He wasn't even popular with us.
But, because of that presumption, the Agency offered him $200,000 (which was less than his attorney fees, btw). We advised him to take it, and we'd discount his fees so he walked away with six figures.
He accepted.
Then decided he wanted his day in Court and tried to get the settlement tossed. We refused to assist. He tried to throw us under the bus, accused my boss of racial discrimination and lying to him, the whole nine yards. He lost this effort, of course, because we were a firm that specialized in this kind of work and probably the most valuable practice tip I learned at this job was to vet clients thoroughly and document *everything* for when they eventually try this. We were his second law firm on this case and were prepared.
He ended up successfully getting the settlement tossed, but then walked away with $0 and around half a million in fees that he owed three law firms now.
Play stupid games and win stupid prizes, but the fact we were able to bully the Federal Government into throw that much money at him to just make him go away was absurd.
There are valid Title VII claims, I've seen them, but the majority of our Title VII clients were cases like this: a non-White who was absolute shit at their job finally getting punished and becoming absolutely convinced it was because they were some shade of brown.
Now, once in a while they were actually right. But like clockwork, the only type of Title VII case that was consistently supported by Direct Evidence of racial animus was the post-2020 massive and sudden spike in firing older White men for being older, White, and men.