Feds Try To Bankrupt a Moving Company for Hiring Strong, Young Movers
Nobody complained about the company, so federal bureaucrats launched their own crusade.
Is it unfair if a company that specializes in picking up and transporting heavy loads emphasizes hiring younger people over employing senior citizens? That's the federal government's position in the case of Meathead Movers, a California business that bills itself as offering "athlete movers" who are "clean-cut, strong, and professionally-trained." The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has spent years investigating the company for age discrimination and even filed a rare agency-initiated lawsuit against the company with no individual plaintiff claiming harm. Now, Arizona's Goldwater Institute is suing the EEOC to find out what's behind the federal bureaucracy's anti-meathead jihad.
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Why Would You Prefer Strong, Young Movers?
"The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed suit against the San Luis Obispo moving company Meathead Movers, Inc., the largest independent moving company in California, for refusing to hire people based on age," the federal bureaucracy boasted in September of 2023. "The EEOC's lawsuit charges that since at least 2017, Meathead Movers failed to recruit and hire applicants over 40 into moving, packing and customer service positions. Meathead maintains a pattern or practice of recruiting and hiring young college students, intentionally excluding older workers regardless of their individual abilities."
Founded in 1997 by two then-high school athletes, Aaron and Evan Steed, the company has grown into California's largest independent moving company based on the what the company describes as "the brothers' vision of energetic athletes delivering a unique customer service experience."
A 2017 profile in Inc. magazine described the company's evolution into not just a larger and more successful moving company, but a launch pad for young athletes. Meathead Movers "hires student athletes with ambitious career goals and helps them achieve those goals through coaching, training, and confidence building. When employees start their postgraduation job searches, founder Aaron Steed proactively calls hiring managers to sing their praises." To that end, the profile added, "the business recruits its 350-plus movers–mostly wrestlers, as well as football and baseball players–from colleges in southern and central California."
The approach has fans. This year, Pacific Coast Business Times surveyed 1,400 employees at almost 100 companies and named Meathead Movers among the "2025 Central Coast Best Places to Work."
This means the company's founders built a growing moving business that's popular among its employees (and presumably the customers who have driven that growth) by hiring strong young people to pack, lift, and transport heavy objects while they are in the prime of fitness. It trains them for the larger work world after moving and then launches them. Then it hires more.
Pay Us $15 Million and Shut Up About It
That's kind of a cool business model. But the feds don't like it. They began investigating Meathead Movers roughly a decade ago. Then they slapped the company with a demand for $15 million and changes in its internal practices to settle the EEOC's age-discrimination claims.
"We of course said, 'sorry, we can't afford that' and I'm never going to agree to go out of business," Meathead Movers CEO Aaron Steed objects in a video posted to Facebook. "From there, we had three mediations, all of which failed. I agreed to all the non-monetary demands: changing our training, changing the wording in our slogan, all kinds of things. And still, they wanted an eight-figure settlement which would have bankrupted my company."
The EEOC didn't like Steed going public, so it told the company to shut up. Meathead Movers wouldn't be allowed to share its ordeal or its side of the story with the public.
"The EEOC issued a gag order demanding that Aaron and his company cease all public communication—including social media posts—about the case, under threat of additional legal action," according to the Goldwater Institute, which is now involved in the case. "In other words, the government is now trampling on the First Amendment rights of the company's founder, simply because it doesn't like that the company is sharing the truth about the government's actions in this case."
The Only People With a Complaint Are Federal Bureaucrats
Interestingly, the EEOC isn't backing a lawsuit filed by aggrieved current or former employees—it's still trawling for anybody with an axe to grind against Meathead Movers on the agency's website, desperately looking for "individuals aged 40 or older who applied to Meathead and believe they were not hired because of their age." In the absence of somebody with a complaint, the EEOC launched its own lawsuit based on its distaste for the company's philosophy and business practices.
"Within the EEOC, no current or former employee has ever filed an age discrimination claim against Meathead Movers," noted Dylan Foreman of local NBC affiliate KSBY in a March story about the case. "The EEOC has filed only eight lawsuits based on its own initiated investigations within the last 10 years across all statutes and in all federal courts across the entire country."
The EEOC admits that even short of lawsuits, "directed investigations" in the absence of complaints by aggrieved individuals are unusual and constitute "far less than 1%" of its volume.
That makes the ongoing crusade against this moving company highly unusual. Federal bureaucrats are going out of their way to torment a business—CEO Aaron Steed says the company has run up $1.5 million in legal costs so far—in the absence of any aggrieved parties other than themselves.
The Tri-County Chamber Alliance, representing chambers of commerce in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, calls the case against Meathead Movers "a shocking government shakedown by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission."
Is the EEOC Waging a Personal Vendetta?
Frankly, it looks like a personal vendetta or a hit job. It's certainly something worth looking into. And that's exactly what the Goldwater Institute is now doing.
Last week, after federal bureaucrats ignored a public records request on behalf of Meathead Movers, Goldwater filed a lawsuit against the EEOC seeking "records pertaining to the total number of complaints against Meathead Movers, publicly-available information about the EEOC's investigation of Meathead Movers, information about other agency-initiated lawsuits, including allegations of age discrimination, and communications about Meathead Movers, including to and from specific EEOC officials."
Maybe with the help of the Goldwater Institute, Meathead Movers will finally discover why federal bureaucrats want to drive the company out of business.
