Opinion ID: 439951
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: alleged supervening supreme court precedent

Text: 19 Laffey I affirmed district court determinations that the purser/stewardess pay differential, and the cleaning allowance for men's uniforms but not women's, violated the Equal Pay Act and Title VII. Supervening Supreme Court decisions, NWA maintains, reveal that those affirmations were wrong. NWA cites County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 161, 101 S.Ct. 2242, 68 L.Ed.2d 751 (1981), as supervening precedent establishing that the purser/stewardess pay differential was lawful, and relies on General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125, 97 S.Ct. 401, 50 L.Ed.2d 343 (1976), with regard to the cleaning allowance. Neither High Court decision, we conclude, alters the law earlier applied in this case. We therefore reaffirm Laffey I as the law of the case and of the circuit. 2
20 The alleged supervening decision, County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 161, 101 S.Ct. 2242, 68 L.Ed.2d 751 (1981), resolved this sole issue: whether female jail guards who did not prove their work equal in skill, effort, and responsibility to the work of male jail guards, and therefore failed to establish an Equal Pay Act violation, could nonetheless challenge their rate of pay as discriminatory under Title VII. 452 U.S. at 166 n. 8, 101 S.Ct. at 2246 n. 8. The Supreme Court answered yes; it held that despite complainants failure to satisfy the equal work standard, they could remain in court under Title VII on their charge that the County had set the wage scale for female guards, but not for male guards, at a level lower than its own survey of outside markets and the worth of the jobs warranted. Id. at 166, 101 S.Ct. at 2246. Title VII, the Court explained, in contrast to the Equal Pay Act, does not bar claims of discriminatory undercompensation ... merely because [the female complainants] do not perform work equal to that of male [employees]. Id. at 181, 101 S.Ct. at 2254. 21 In imaginative argument, NWA asks us to spy a silver lining for employers in Gunther. NWA urges that the Supreme Court, in the process of rejecting a proffered restricted reading of Title VII, enlarged the scope of the Equal Pay Act's residuary affirmative defense, which permits payment of different wages if made pursuant to ... a differential based on any other factor other than sex. 3 For purposes of this argument, NWA concedes that pursers and stewardesses in fact performed equal work within the meaning of the Equal Pay Act. 4 But grace a Gunther, NWA contends, an employer who premises a wage differential on his determination that two jobs are different escapes Equal Pay Act and Title VII liability, even if that conclusion is later found to be mistaken. Brief for Northwest Airlines, Inc. [hereafter, NWA Brief] at 33. 22 For two reasons we cannot indulge NWA's endeavor to persuade us that Gunther widened the Equal Pay Act's exception for pay differentials based on a bona fide use of 'other factors other than sex.'  Gunther, 452 U.S. at 170, 101 S.Ct. at 2248 (quoting 29 U.S.C. Sec. 206(d)(1)(iv) (1982). First, NWA's position is incompatible with the statutory design. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress adopted as the procedural and remedial framework for Equal Pay Act claims, a court has discretion to disallow, in whole or in part, liquidated (double) damages if the employer shows to the satisfaction of the court that the act or omission giving rise to [the violation] was in good faith and that he had reasonable grounds for believing that his act or omission was not a violation of t[he Act]. 29 U.S.C. Sec. 260 (1982). NWA contends that an employer's actual but erroneous belief that two jobs are in fact different wholly shelters the employer from equal pay for equal work liability, NWA Brief at 14, 33; that contention is not synchronous with a congressional direction giving judges discretion only to limit, not to eliminate, damages when an employer, in good faith, erroneously but reasonably believed his conduct conformed to legal requirements. 5 23 Second, NWA's inflation of the Equal Pay Act's residuary defense to exonerate employers who in fact failed to reward equal work with equal pay, so long as they honestly believed the jobs in question in fact were different, Reply Brief of Northwest Airlines, Inc. [hereafter, NWA Reply Brief] at 3-4, 19, is not sensibly extracted from Justice Brennan's opinion for the Court in Gunther. That decision interpreted Title VII to accommodate sexbased discrimination in compensation claims that did not fit within the equal pay for equal work principle. Specifically, Gunther rejected the argument that the Bennett Amendment to Title VII, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000e-2(h) (1982), 6 confined Title VII sex-based wage discrimination complaints to claims that could also be brought under the Equal Pay Act. Gunther held that the Bennett Amendment had a more modest design: it simply incorporated into Title VII the Equal Pay Act's four affirmative defenses. 7 The Gunther opinion left untouched governing law on equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. See Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, 417 U.S. 188, 190, 94 S.Ct. 2223, 2226, 41 L.Ed.2d 1 (1974). 24 NWA features most prominently, see NWA Brief at 28-29, lines clipped from a passage in Gunther in which Justice Brennan focused on the Equal Pay Act's fourth affirmative defense, applicable to differentials based on any other factor other than sex. 29 U.S.C. Sec. 206(d)(1)(iv) (1982). In this passage, Justice Brennan stated that genuinely non-sex-based factors, for example, a bona fide job rating system, might be used by an employer in setting compensation, without offense to federal law, even when such factors have a disparate impact on one sex. Gunther, 452 U.S. at 170-71 & n. 11, 101 S.Ct. at 2248-2249 & n. 11. 25 Basing wages on a bona fide job rating system--a sex-neutral, objective measure--exemplifies the legitimate employer conduct Congress envisioned as a permissible use of 'other factors other than sex,'  Gunther explained. Id. NWA, however, employed no bona fide job rating system or other sex-neutral, objective standard 8 in setting wage rates for pursers and stewardesses. The passage NWA clips, read in its entirety, contains no suggestion that Congress also envisioned as a bona fide other factor an employer's mere belief, untested by any objective job rating system, that men and women are not engaging in equal work. Indeed, a fair reading of the passage indicates just the opposite. 9 26 Gunther, in the portion featured by NWA, addressed only the impact Equal Pay Act affirmative defenses might have on the outcome of some Title VII sexbased wage discrimination cases. Gunther, 452 U.S. at 170, 175 n. 14, 101 S.Ct. at 2248, 2250 n. 14. NWA, however, maintains that the Court's discussion should be read to augur incorporation of a line of Title VII disparate treatment decisions into Equal Pay Act law. 10 Even if we could find in Gunther the between-the-lines dictum NWA ascribes to the Court, NWA's argument for exoneration from equal pay liability would not succeed. 27 The Title VII decisions NWA cites unexceptionally involve situations in which the employer did not classify jobs overtly by sex (or race). E.g., Texas Department of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981). In that setting, where sex-based categorization, if it exists, is covert, the Court has elaborated rules for establishing discriminatory intent or the lack thereof. This case, however, involves overt sex classification--explicitly disparate treatment. Purser jobs were reserved for men only; the stewardess class was all-female. 11 NWA has cited no case, nor do we know of any, suggesting that a Title VII or Equal Pay Act plaintiff must demonstrate, beyond sex-segregated job classifications and unequal pay for equal work, the employer's evil mind--in NWA's words, disparate treatment that proceeds from discriminatory animus or a bad-faith attempt to evade the law. NWA Brief at 14, 39. 28 In sum, so far as we can tell, neither Congress nor the Court has ever entertained the notion that an employer who intentionally classifies jobs by sex, and in fact pays women less for the same work, can achieve exoneration by showing he sincerely thought the jobs he separated by sex were different. But see NWA Brief at 33; NWA Reply Brief at 3-4, 19. Justice Brennan's opinion in Gunther, it is certain, establishes no such novel law. Where, as here, there is an actual intent to separate jobs by sex, and the employer is found in fact to have paid women less for equal work, all precedent in point indicates that disparate treatment is solidly established. 12 29 In Goodrich v. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, 712 F.2d 1488, 1493 n. 11 (D.C.Cir.1983), we noted that the Equal Pay Act's residuary defense covering factors other than sex affords no convenient escape from the Act's basic command. Unless and until Congress or the Supreme Court declares otherwise, our dominant guides remain the command that equal work will be rewarded by equal wages, S.Rep. No. 176, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. 1 (1963), and the instruction that the Equal Pay Act is a broadly remedial statute targeting an endemic problem of employment discrimination, by firmly establishing as federal law the principle of equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. Corning Glass Works, 417 U.S. at 190, 195, 208, 94 S.Ct. at 2226, 2228, 2234. NWA's argument, attributing to Gunther a meaning that would substantially reduce the force of the federal equal pay requirement, is artful but unavailing; it fails to elevate from the untenable to the plausible the claim that in Laffey I we incorrectly stated the law governing the purser/stewardess pay differential.
30 Laffey I affirmed the district court's determination that NWA discriminated on the basis of sex by providing a male-only uniform cleaning allowance. 567 F.2d at 456. Laffey II held a second challenge to the district court's ruling on the cleaning allowance unwarranted by any circumstance capable of generating injustice from adherence to the law of the case. 642 F.2d at 586. Despite the stern law of the case analysis and admonition in Laffey II, id. at 585-86, and the court's further statement that it considered Laffey I 's cleaning allowance holding fully accurate, id. at 586, 13 NWA seeks to continue the fray. It cites General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125, 97 S.Ct. 401, 50 L.Ed.2d 343 (1976), and describes that case as an intervening decision, NWA Brief at 17, although Gilbert issued over two years before Laffey II was argued. 14 31 Gilbert was a Title VII challenge that turned on the Court's conclusion that the disability program in question did not group persons by gender as such. Gilbert, 429 U.S. at 134-35, 97 S.Ct. at 407-408 (quoting Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, 496 & n. 20, 94 S.Ct. 2485, 2492 & n. 20, 41 L.Ed.2d 256 (1974)). The issue was an employer's exclusion of women unable to work due to pregnancy or childbirth from disability benefits. The program did not divide potential recipients by gender as such, the Court reasoned, because one of the two groups comprised nonpregnant persons, and thus include[d] members of both sexes. Gilbert, 429 U.S. at 134-35, 97 S.Ct. at 407-408. In the absence of classification based upon gender as such, the Court inquired whether there was any gender-based discriminatory effect. Id. at 137-39, 97 S.Ct. at 408-410. NWA relies on the discriminatory effect portion of the Gilbert analysis. NWA Brief at 53. 32 Even in Gilbert itself, however, the Court indicated that discriminatory effect analysis should not come into play when the program at issue divides recipients into groups classified by gender as such. 429 U.S. at 136-37 & n. 15, 97 S.Ct. at 408-409 & n. 15. 15 That is the situation here--all male cabin attendants received a uniform benefit package with a cleaning allowance, all female attendants received a different package without a cleaning allowance. 16 33 Congress has overruled Gilbert prospectively to prohibit sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, 17 and the Supreme Court believes Congress also rejected the test of discrimination [Gilbert ] employed. Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. v. EEOC, --- U.S. ----, ----, ----, 103 S.Ct. 2622, 2627, 2631, 77 L.Ed.2d 89 (1983). In its most recent expression in point, the Court left no doubt that, when classification by sex is undisguised, there is no need to consider, as Gilbert did, the average monetary value of the [overall benefit package in question] to male and female employees. Id. 103 S.Ct. at 2632 n. 26. Further, the Court quoted with apparent approval the EEOC's position that it is not a defense under Title VII to a charge of sex discrimination in benefits that the cost of such benefits is greater with respect to one sex than the other. Id. (quoting 29 C.F.R. Sec. 1604.9(e) (1983)). 34 In Laffey II, the court described the cleaning allowance as simply another supplement to male salaries. 642 F.2d at 589. Gilbert presents no occasion for us to study again that twice-studied issue. See id. at 586. 35