Discrimination claims fall to 24-year low; retaliation and disability top the list.

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With fewer employees in their workplaces last year due to the pandemic, the volume of employee-on-employee harassment and discrimination also declined. In fact, the total number of employee discrimination charges filed with the EEOC lastyear (61,331) was the lowest since 1997, when the agency began to using its current system to track data.

Still, this isn't an isolated trend. Discrimination charges have been declining steadily since reaching an all-time high of 99,947 charges in fiscal year 2011.

Retaliation was again by far the most common complaint (34,332), cited in more than half of all EEOC claims. That's because plaintiff attorneys now routinely encourage employees to look for some type of way in which they were punished at work for their legal complaint so they can add a retaliation charge on top of other complaints.

For the third year in a row, disability discrimination was the most common protected-class bias charge, with many claims related to the pandemic. Since April...