Opinion ID: 2470930
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: What Is an Affirmative Action Plan?

Text: The Supreme Court has never said what, for purposes of the Weber/Johnson defense to § 703(a), is an affirmative action plan. But the Court has differentiated affirmative action from other forms of relief a court might order under § 706(g) of Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(g). We think that distinction is applicable here. Before delving into those cases, we pause to note that, in adopting for § 703(a) the definition of affirmative action found in the Supreme Court's § 706(g) cases, we do not mean to suggest that the authority of a court to order an employer to do something (as limited by § 706(g)) is coterminous with an employer's power to do that same thing voluntarily without violating § 703(a). The Supreme Court has expressly rejected that proposition, for the suggestion that employers should be able to do no more voluntarily than courts can order as remedies ignores the fundamental difference between volitional private behavior and the exercise of coercion by the State. Johnson, 480 U.S. at 630 n. 8, 107 S.Ct. 1442 (citation omitted). We rely on the § 706(g) cases only for their definition of what affirmative action is, and not for their discussion of when affirmative action is permissible. Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 v. Stotts, 467 U.S. 561, 104 S.Ct. 2576, 81 L.Ed.2d 483 (1984) is the earliest § 706(g) case relevant to a definition of affirmative action. In Stotts, black firefighters in Memphis, Tennessee, brought a § 703(a) pattern-or-practice racial discrimination claim against the Memphis Fire Department. After settlement negotiations, a consent decree was entered and approved by the district court. Among other things, the consent decree provided a hiring goal for black firefighters. The next year, because of budget difficulties, Memphis decided to lay some employees off. Under a contract between the city and the Firefighters' Union, layoffs were to follow a last hired, first fired rule. The result of following that rule would have been to lay off a significant proportion of black firefighters, thereby undoing much of what the hiring goal had accomplished. Upon the black firefighters' request, the district court issued an injunction to prevent the black firefighters from being laid off. The Court of Appeals affirmed. In order to comply with this injunction, the city laid off or demoted several white firefighters instead, even though they had more seniority than the black firefighters protected by the injunction. Of the several arguments made in favor of the Stotts district court's injunction, one in particular is relevant here. The Court of Appeals in Stotts reasoned that (1) if the black firefighters had shown a Title VII violation, the district court could, under § 706(g), have ordered the city not to lay off black firefighters, and (2) anything that a district court can order under § 706(g) when a Title VII violation has been proven, the court can also order to effectuate the purpose of a Title VII consent decree. Id. at 578, 104 S.Ct. 2576. The Supreme Court disagreed with the first of these premises, and held that the Court of Appeals imposed on the parties as an adjunct of settlement something that could not have been ordered had the case gone to trial and the plaintiffs proved that a pattern or practice of discrimination existed. Id. at 579, 104 S.Ct. 2576. A court could not have ordered such relief, the Court explained, because a court can award competitive seniority only when the beneficiary of the award has actually been a victim of illegal discrimination. Id. But there had been no finding that any of the blacks protected from layoff had been a victim of discrimination and no award of competitive seniority to any of them at the time of the consent decree. Id. Stotts did, however, expressly avoid deciding [w]hether the City, a public employer, could have taken this course without violating the law, if Memphis had acted unilaterally, that is, voluntarily and not under court order. Id. at 583, 104 S.Ct. 2576. [41] The next significant case is Local 28, Sheet Metal Workers' Int'l Ass'n v. EEOC, 478 U.S. 421, 106 S.Ct. 3019, 92 L.Ed.2d 344 (1986). In Local 28, the Government successfully sued a union with a long and egregious history of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics. The union was found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination in recruitment, selection, training, and admission to the union. At the § 706(g) remedy stage, the district court established a 29% nonwhite membership goal, ordered the union to adopt an affirmative action plan for reaching this goal, and appointed an administrator to oversee the plan. The plan required the union to offer annual, nondiscriminatory journeyman and apprentice examinations, select members according to a white-non-white ratio to be negotiated by the parties, conduct extensive recruitment and publicity campaigns aimed at minorities, secure the administrator's consent before issuing temporary work permits, and maintain detailed membership records, including separate records for whites and non-whites. Id. at 432-33, 106 S.Ct. 3019. After two appeals to our court, which resulted in only two changes to the plana minor modification to the white-nonwhite ratio, and an extra year for the union to meet the goal the union had only reached 10.8% nonwhite membership. Id. at 434, 106 S.Ct. 3019. State and local authorities moved in the district court to hold the union in contempt. The district court held the union in contempt, not simply because the union had not met the goal, but also because the union had failed to comply with the requirements of the underlying affirmative action plan, and had withheld information from the administrator and the court, thereby making monitoring the union's compliance difficult. Id. at 434-35, 106 S.Ct. 3019. The district court issued another contempt order after another year of noncompliance. Id. at 435-36, 106 S.Ct. 3019. The court at that time established a slightly different minority membership goal, and abolished the apprenticeship examination, which had been a vehicle for noncompliance. (The examination was replaced with selection by a three-member board, which would select white and minority apprentices at a one-to-one ratio.) A divided panel of our court affirmed in all respects relevant here, citing the union's foot-dragging egregious noncompliance with the plan. Id. at 438, 106 S.Ct. 3019 (citing EEOC v. Local 638, Local 28 of Sheet Metal Workers' Int'l Ass'n, 753 F.2d 1172, 1183 (2d Cir.1985)). At the Supreme Court, a four-Justice plurality upheld the affirmative action plan against the union's claim that § 706(g) permits a district court to award preferential relief only to the actual victims of unlawful discrimination. The plurality held that § 706(g) does not prohibit a court from ordering, in appropriate circumstances, affirmative race-conscious relief as a remedy for past discrimination.... [S]uch relief may be appropriate where an employer or a labor union has engaged in persistent or egregious discrimination, or where necessary to dissipate the lingering effects of pervasive discrimination. Id. at 445, 106 S.Ct. 3019 (plurality opinion). The plurality distinguished Stotts thus: Stotts discussed the policy behind § 706(g) in order to supplement the holding that the District Court could not have interfered with the city's seniority system in fashioning a Title VII remedy. This policy was read to prohibit a court from awarding make-whole relief, such as competitive seniority, backpay, or promotion, to individuals who were denied employment opportunities for reasons unrelated to discrimination. The District Court's injunction was considered to be inconsistent with this policy because it was tantamount to an award of make-whole relief (in the form of competitive seniority) to individual black firefighters who had not shown that the proposed layoffs were motivated by racial discrimination. However, this limitation on individual make-whole relief does not affect a court's authority to order race-conscious affirmative action. The purpose of affirmative action is not to make identified victims whole, but rather to dismantle prior patterns of employment discrimination and to prevent discrimination in the future. Such relief is provided to the class as a whole rather than to individual members; no individual is entitled to relief, and beneficiaries need not show that they were themselves victims of discrimination. In this case, neither the membership goal nor the Fund order required petitioners to indenture or train particular individuals, and neither required them to admit to membership individuals who were refused admission for reasons unrelated to discrimination. Id. at 474, 106 S.Ct. 3019 (citation and footnotes omitted). [42] The Local 28 distinction between affirmative action and make-whole relief, we think, makes equal sense in the § 703(a) context, for it harmonizes Ricci with Johnson and Weber. In Ricci, a § 703(a) case, the employer action that was challenged was the discarding of the results of a test that had already been administered. This action was individualized, for what it did, in essence, was to give promotionor at least another chance at promotionto the individual black firefighters who had taken the test, at the expense of those firefighters who would have been eligible for promotion if the test results had been certified. As the Supreme Court explained: [W]e [do not] question an employer's affirmative efforts to ensure that all groups have a fair opportunity to apply for promotions and to participate in the process by which promotions will be made. But once that process has been established and employers have made clear their selection criteria, they may not then invalidate the test results, thus upsetting an employee's legitimate expectation not to be judged on the basis of race. Doing so, absent a strong basis in evidence of an impermissible disparate impact, ... is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race. 129 S.Ct. at 2677. In other words, when an employer, acting ex ante, although in the light of past discrimination, establishes hiring or promotion procedures designed to promote equal opportunity and eradicate future discrimination, that may constitute an affirmative action plan. But where an employer, already having established its procedures in a certain waysuch as through a seniority systemthrows out the results of those procedures ex post because of the racial or gender composition of those results, that constitutes an individualized grant of employment benefits which must be individually justified, and not affirmative action. The affirmative action plans in Johnson and Weber were quite different from such make-whole relief. The plan in Weber set out to achieve a better future racial balance among skilled craftworkers at Kaiser Steel's Gramercy plant, by requiring that 50% of production workers chosen for the skilled craftworker training program be black. See 443 U.S. at 199, 99 S.Ct. 2721. This plan was adopted pursuant to an affirmative-action provision in the collective bargaining agreement recently negotiated between the United Steelworkers and Kaiser. Id. at 197-98, 99 S.Ct. 2721. The plaintiff, Brian Weber, argued that the plan violated § 703(a) and (d) because he was denied entry into the training program, in favor of less senior black workers. But the Supreme Court treated the plan in Weber as affirmative action. That result is readily explained by the Local 28 distinction. Instead of, say, granting retroactive seniority to specific individual black production workers, or throwing out the results of previous selection processes, the plan benefited all members of the racially defined class in a forward-looking manner. And it was adopted in a newly negotiated collective bargaining agreement rather than unilaterally by the employer in derogation of an earlier agreement. The plan in Johnson, likewise, did not grant individualized employment benefits to any specific women or racial minorities. The employer in Johnson, noting the underrepresentation of women in certain job classifications, decided to authorize the consideration of sex as one of several factors in deciding which of several qualified applicants to promote. 480 U.S. at 620-21, 107 S.Ct. 1442. Although this plan ultimately resulted in the promotion of a woman over a man who was otherwise slightly better qualified, see id. at 623-24, 107 S.Ct. 1442, the wheels were set in motion ex ante. The employer decided on a plan that benefited the entire class of women, and then it simply applied that plan in a particular instance. By way of contrast, the employer had not previously adopted a different, gender-neutral method of selecting employees for promotion and then opted to throw it out when confronted with the reality that a particular woman would not be promoted under that method. The Arroyo and Caldero Intervenors contend, however, that the line between affirmative action governed by Weber and Johnson on the one hand, and race- or gender-conscious action taken for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, Ricci, 129 S.Ct. at 2677, on the other, must be drawn quite differently. We find their attempts to circumscribe Ricci to be without merit. The Arroyo Intervenors first suggest that Ricci essentially be limited to its facts. They say that Ricci applies only where an employer is motivated by [f]ear of litigation alone, id. at 2681, and that  Ricci's new legal standard has no application to a case like this one involving an employer's well-informed decision, after years of defending against employment discrimination claims, to enter into a settlement to redress ongoing and pervasive racial exclusion in a particular class of jobs. Arroyo Reply Br. at 5. That argument confuses the Ricci strong-basis-in-evidence standard with the threshold question of whether Ricci applies. In Ricci, the Supreme Court said that an employer motivated by fear of litigation alone does not have an adequate strong basis in evidence. The Court did not suggest that the strong-basis-in-evidence standard applies only when an employer is motivated by fear of litigation alone. Indeed, it would make no sense to require a strong basis in evidence of only those employers who take race- or gender-conscious actions that are not well-informed. Second, both the Arroyo and Caldero Intervenors assert that Ricci is limited to situations in which an employer, acting to avoid a disparate-impact Title VII violation that has not yet occurred, discards the results of a promotional exam that would otherwise result in the awarding of particular promotions to particular candidates. Arroyo Reply Br. at 9-12; Caldero Reply Br. at 64-66. That is, they seek to place at least three limitations on the scope of Ricci: (1) Ricci applies only when the employer seeks to avoid a current disparate-impact violation, while remedies for previous violations are subject to Weber and Johnson; (2) Ricci applies only when the employment benefit denied to the plaintiffs is hiring or promotion; and (3) Ricci applies only when, in the absence of the employer's race- or gender-conscious action, specific plaintiffs would have been entitled to specific positions. None of these narrow readings of Ricci seems to us valid. Ricci is not limited to cases where the employer seeks to avoid a current violation. As the Ricci Court itself stated, its core holding applies whenever an employer takes race-conscious action for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact. 129 S.Ct. at 2677 (emphasis added). And limiting Ricci to the avoidance of current violations would make very little sense. It would be strange to make an employer be subject to Ricci when it promises a set of employment benefits to test-passers but then unilaterally decides not to give the benefits out, while at the same time allowing that employer to avail itself of the more easily satisfied Johnson/Weber standard when it gives out another set of benefits, such as the seniority rights that will lead to the aforementioned benefits. Ricci also is not solely about hiring or promotion. Nothing in the case suggests that when other past established employment benefits are involved employers can take individualized race- or gender-conscious action to remedy an asserted disparate impact without meeting the strong basis in evidence test. See id. at 2676 ([W]e adopt the strong-basis-in-evidence standard as a matter of statutory construction to resolve any conflict between the disparate-treatment and disparate-impact provisions of Title VII. (emphasis added)). For similar reasons, Ricci does not require that specific individuals be entitled to specific positions. When an employer lacks a strong basis in evidence that it would otherwise be liable for disparate impact, the employer should not upset[ ] an employee's legitimate expectation not to be judged on the basis of race. Id. at 2677. That expectation is upset by the race-conscious discarding of conditional entitlements to employment or employment benefits, just as much as it is when the entitlement is absolute. We therefore hold that § 703(a), like § 706(g), draws a distinction between affirmative action plans, which are intended to provide ex ante benefits to all members of a racial or gender class, and make-whole relief, which is intended to provide ex post benefits to specified individuals who have suffered discrimination. And where this latter form of benefits is at issue, the employer may not invoke the affirmative action defense of Johnson and Weber.