Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/12pdf/11-556_11o2.pdf
Page Number: 24.0

Cite as:  570 U. S. ____ (2013) 

21 

Opinion of the Court 

EEOC’s  definition  of  a  supervisor,  which  both  petitioner 
and the United States defend, is a study in ambiguity.  In 
its  Enforcement  Guidance,  the  EEOC  takes  the  position
that an employee, in order to be classified as a supervisor,
must wield authority “ ‘of sufficient magnitude so as to as­
sist  the  harasser  explicitly  or  implicitly  in  carrying  out 
the harassment.’ ”  Id., at 27 (quoting App. to Pet. for Cert.
89a (EEOC Guidance)).  But any  authority over the work
of another employee provides at least some assistance, see 
Ellerth,  supra,  at  763,  and  that  is  not  what  the  United 
States  interprets  the  Guidance  to  mean.    Rather,  it  in­
forms  us,  the  authority  must  exceed  both  an  ill-defined
temporal  requirement  (it  must  be  more  than  “occa­
siona[l]”)  and  an  ill-defined  substantive  requirement  (“an 
employee  who  directs  ‘only  a  limited  number  of  tasks  or 
assignments’  for  another  employee  . . .  would  not  have 
sufficient authority to qualify as a supervisor.”  U. S. Brief 
28 (quoting App. to Pet. for Cert. 92a (EEOC Guidance)); 
U. S. Brief 31. 

We read the EEOC Guidance as saying that the number 
(and perhaps the importance) of the tasks in question is a
factor to be considered in determining whether an employ­
ee qualifies as a supervisor.  And if this is a correct inter­
pretation of the EEOC’s position, what we are left with is 
a proposed standard of remarkable ambiguity.

The vagueness of this standard  was highlighted at oral
argument  when  the  attorney  representing  the  United
States was asked to apply that standard to the situation in 
Faragher,  where  the  alleged  harasser  supposedly  threat­
ened to assign the plaintiff to clean the toilets in the life­
guard station for a year if she did not date him.  524 U. S., 
at 780.  Since cleaning the toilets is just one task, albeit an
unpleasant one, the authority to assign that job would not 
seem  to  meet  the  more-than-a-limited-number-of-tasks 
requirement  in  the  EEOC  Guidance.    Nevertheless,  the 
Government attorney’s first response was that the author­