Employers lost one legal pathway to eliminating job bias suits in federal court in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.

The high court, led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ruled that the requirement that a worker first file a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a precondition to filing a Title VII lawsuit is not a jurisdictional requirement but a mandatory claims-processing rule. And an employer must timely raise a worker’s failure to file a charge or forfeit that defense.