Professional Documents
Culture Documents
>>> Green applied for a mechanic position and his past work for
the company was satisfactory
3) Be rejected for the job in question despite being qualified
>>> Green was not hired
4) After being rejected, the position must remain open and
the company has to continue to seek applicants from
persons of the complainants qualifications
>>> Company continued hiring applicants
~ Application Requirement ~
Futile Act Doctrine: If a company has a longstanding practice
of not hiring minorities
From Teamsters: If an employer should announce his policy of
discrimination by a sign reading "Whites Only" on the hiring-office door,
his victims would not be limited to the few who ignored the sign and
subjected themselves to personal rebuffs. The same message can be
communicated to potential applicants more subtly but just as clearly
by an employer's actual practices - by his consistent discriminatory
treatment of actual applicants, by the manner in which he publicizes
vacancies, his recruitment techniques, his responses to casual or tentative
inquiries, and even by the racial or ethnic composition of that part of his
work force from which he has discriminatorily excluded members of
minority groups
~ Qualification Issue ~
Absolute: The plaintiff possesses minimum qualifications
for the job (e.g., based on a job description)
Relative: The plaintiffs qualifications compare favorably
to others considered for the position (e.g., plaintiff must
prove that he/she was most qualified for the job)
From Teamsters v. U.S. (footnote 44): The plaintiff must prove that her
rejection for a given job was not the result of an absolute or relative lack of
qualifications.
Disparate Treatment
Company Defense (Step 2)
Ct. Appeals --- Prima facie case made; Co. was guilty of discrimination
allegations
History of racial discrimination; rejected as legitimnate the need for
supervisor to select those whose ability was known to him; no whites had
applied at company site
Court of Appeals recommended the company to ... take applications, with
inquiry as to qualifiactions and experience, and then check, evaluate, and
compare those claims against the qualifications and experience of other
bricklayers wuith whom the superintendent was not alrady acquainted.
2) Misrepresentations of records
No evidence of falsifying records introduced
Company Defense
Age-based remarks not made in the context of the decision to
fire Reeves
No evidence that others who recommended Reeves be fired
were motivated by age
Two other decision-makers involved in Reeves firing were over
age 50
All three Hinge Room supervisors were accused of poor
recordkeeping
Several supervisory positions were filled by those over 50 years
old
Court of Appeals erred in limiting evidence after Step 2 to the agerelated remarks, and not considering the facts of the case as a whole.
... the court must review the record taken as a whole.
... the court should review all of the evidence in the record
Challenges burden is to demonstrate:
that the stated reasons were not the real reasons for [petitioners]
discharge;
that age discrimination was the real reason for [petitioners]
discharge.
Given that petitioner established a prima facie case of discrimination,
introduced enough evidence for the jury to reject respondents
explanation, and produced additional evidence of age-based animus,
there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find that respondent had
intentionally discriminated.
Furnco v. Waters:
>>> Establishing a pioma facie case does NOT equal a finding of
discrimination
>>> No requirement to use a process that attracts the most minority
members
>>> Use of statistics (representation) may be used to show motive
~ Pattern or Practice
Discrimination ~
versus
% indicative of the relevant population or labor force
Or cross-job comparisons (e.g., between 2 jobs) within an organization
White
Black & Hispanic
____________________________________________________
Intercity drivers
1802
13
Local drivers
1117
167
_____________________________________________________
Also, the government introduced population statistics that showed further
disparities. For instance, some company terminals in areas of substantial black
population had no black intercity drivers.
a prima facie
case
Statistics showing racial or ethnic imbalance are probative in a case such as this one only
because such imbalance is often a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination; absent
explanation, it is ordinarily to be expected that nondiscriminatory hiring practices will in
time result in a work force more or less representative of the racial and ethnic
composition of the population in the community from which employees are hired. Evidence
of long lasting and gross disparity between the composition of a work force and that
of the general population thus may be significant even though 703 (j) makes clear that
Title VII imposes no requirement that a work force mirror the general population."
From Title VII ---703 (j) Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to
require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor
management committee subject to this subchapter to grant preferential treatment to any
individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of
such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to
the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national
origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any
employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any
labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training
program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such
race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other
area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.
Teamsters
[Degree of disparity between workforce & population statistics]
"At best, these attacks go only to the accuracy of the comparison between the composition of
the company's work force at various terminals and the general population of the surrounding
communities. They detract little from the Government's further showing that Negroes and
Spanish-surnamed Americans who were hired were overwhelmingly excluded from line-driver
jobs. Such employees were willing to work, had access to the terminal, were healthy and of
working age, and often were at least sufficiently qualified to hold city-driver jobs. Yet they
became line drivers with far less frequency than whites. ... Of 2,919 whites who held driving
jobs in 1971, 1,802 (62%) were line drivers and 1,117 (38%) were city drivers; of 180 Negroes
and Spanish-surnamed Americans who held driving jobs, 13 (7%) were line drivers and 167
(93%) were city drivers. In any event, fine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured
the glaring absence of minority line drivers. As the Court of Appeals remarked, the
company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics
but from "the inexorable zero."
In cases where the differences are vast, technical issues regarding statistical
analyses/comparisons may be irrelevant
1231
405
1.8%
3.7%
15.4%
5.7%
2.3%
>>> Hazelwood won since the S.C. decided that they had
articulated a legitimate reason for the imbalance (e.g.,
competition from the City of St. Louis) when the proper relevant
labor market was used