Opinion ID: 347588
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Educational Requirements

Text: 160 In 1970 Stockham instituted a requirement that all apprentices have a high school diploma or its equivalent. Before 1970 only a grammar school education was required. Under Title VII, practices and procedures cannot be maintained if they operate to 'freeze' the status quo of prior discriminatory employment practices. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. at 430, 91 S.Ct. at 853. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited. Id. at 431, 91 S.Ct. at 853. The plaintiffs contend that the high school education requirement is a neutral employment practice that operates to perpetuate the effects of past discrimination because it has an adverse impact on black employees and has not been shown to be job-related. The district court reached a contrary conclusion, finding: 161 There has been no showing on the part of plaintiffs that the education and age guidelines produce a disproportionate impact on black applicants, . . . as there is no significant difference between the percentage of black and white employees at Stockham possessing high school educations. Until a showing of disproportionate impact is made, Stockham is not required to demonstrate that the education and age requirements are job related. (Footnotes omitted.) 162 394 F.Supp. at 497. The evidence shows that 61.5 percent of the white hourly workers have a high school education; whereas, only 50.1 percent of the black hourly workers meet that requirement. Because 66 percent of the production and maintenance workers are black, these percentages mean that 280 white employees as compared with 772 blacks are disqualified from the apprenticeship program by this requirement. Further, while 58 white workers have been selected for apprentice training since the requirement was imposed in 1970, only 6 black employees have been chosen. Apparently as a second reason for finding there was no adverse impact on blacks from the operation of the education requirement, the district court found that the requirement is not automatically applied, citing the following statistics: 163 Since 1965 the high school education level requirement for the apprentice program has been waived on 4 occasions, 3 times for white employees and once for a black employee. 164 394 F.Supp. at 477. The statistics cited by the court fall of their own weight. While fewer blacks have a high school diploma than whites, the requirement has been waived for only four employees out of 64; three of these were white. 165 The evidence that fewer blacks than whites proportionately have attained a high school education and that only 9 percent of the employees chosen for the program during the operation of the educational requirement have been black when two-thirds of the work force is black compels us to conclude that the high school requirement is discriminatory in its effect. Therefore, Stockham had the burden of showing that the requirement has a manifest relationship to the apprenticeship program. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., supra, 401 U.S. at 432, 91 S.Ct. at 854. The defendant offered no evidence to satisfy this burden.