Opinion ID: 381263
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Plaintiff's Fifth Amendment Claim

Text: 31 Ms. Hanson alleged in her complaint, para. 8 that the 32 Personnel Policies, as will be more fully shown on trial, prevented the accumulation of adequate leave which could be used for the purposes of maternity leave, thereby denying all health insurance benefits to, and terminating the position of, any woman forced to take the maximum maternity leave provided for in said Personnel Policies. 33 App. 2. 34 She further submitted an affidavit in opposition to the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint in which she alleged 35 8. That defendant's disbursing office informed her that defendant did not permit any type of leave without pay and at the time her accumulated annual or sick leave ran out she would be taken off the payroll. 36 9. That in addition, defendant's disbursing office informed her that at the time an employee is taken off the payroll all of her Blue Cross coverage would cease. 37 10. That from January 1976 up to approximately May 8, 1976 she attempted verbally to receive clarification from her supervisors concerning the status of her position and health insurance during the entire period of maternity leave provided for by the Personnel Policies. However, no clarification was received. 38 11. On May 8, 1976 when she was seven months pregnant, she wrote to Mrs. Josephine Collins, Chief Operator of the U.S. Capitol Telephone Exchange, requesting clarification of the policy pertaining to employee maternity leave. 39 12. That defendant responded to her request on May 21, 1976 by a letter in which he dismissed her, stating that the policy as enunciated is emphatically clear and that he know(s) of no way to restate the policy to make it more lucid. App. 40 (emphasis supplied). 3 40 Defendant maintains that the policy on its face provides not only for eight weeks' maternity leave as a matter of course, but for extensions by special request if validated by a doctor's certificate. 4 He admits that a pregnant woman would not be paid or continue to receive health insurance coverage during maternity leave once her accumulated sick and annual leave ran out, 5 but asserts in his brief that in practice the Senate Telephone Exchange has . . . routinely allowed employees who would otherwise go off the payroll during the course of a leave for maternity or other purposes to work out an extension of payroll coverage, by taking half-pay during the last few weeks of their active employment and receiving the other half when their annual-sick leave pay runs out. Brief for Appellee at 7-8 n. 5. To construe the policy to fire a woman when her annual-sick leave runs out, defendant contends, is a tortured reading. Brief for Appellee at 7 n. 4. The district court termed such a reading inaccurate. App. 45. 6 41 It is not at all clear to us that plaintiff's concerns (1) about retaining her job after her accumulated annual and sick leave expired; and (2) about receiving pay and insurance benefits during maternity leave, were unreasonable. It does not need a tortured reading of the policy to say that the taking of eight weeks' maternity leave would endanger a woman's job status if she had not accumulated that much annual and sick leave. Plaintiff was the first woman in her office to become pregnant following the issuance of the policy; the maternity leave policy had not previously been applied, and she apparently was not told the reassuring interpretations defendant now proffers. If we believe the allegations in her affidavit, she was told by the disbursing officer that when her leave ran out she would be taken off the payroll and that the Exchange did not permit any type of leave without pay. App. 40. For her persistence in her efforts to obtain clarification, plaintiff was fired. 42
43 The district court noted that constitutional claims of sexual discrimination based on an employer's refusal to grant sick pay on the same terms for pregnancy as for illnesses or disabilities are foreclosed under Geduldig, supra, unless the policy can be shown to be a pretext for sexual discrimination. See Nashville Gas Co. v. Satty, supra, 434 U.S. at 143, 98 S.Ct. at 352 (equating sick leave pay with disability insurance benefits, the latter of which were at issue both in Geduldig, supra, and Gilbert, supra ). 44 But, as the district court recognized, Geduldig did not hold that the exclusion of pregnancy or maternity absence from disability benefits can never be found unconstitutionally discriminatory. A plan where distinctions involving pregnancy are mere pretexts designed to effect an invidious discrimination against the members of one sex will not pass constitutional muster. Geduldig, 417 U.S. at 496 n. 20, 94 S.Ct. at 2491-2492. See Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 248, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 2051, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976); Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 99 S.Ct. 2282, 2292-93, 60 L.Ed.2d 870 (1979). See also Gilbert, supra, 429 U.S. at 136, 97 S.Ct. at 408; Satty, supra, 434 U.S. at 143-44, 98 S.Ct. at 352. 45 In this case, for instance, if the plan were to operate to prevent employees from accumulating the eight weeks of leave which may be necessary for childbirth (see Gilbert, supra, 429 U.S. at 130 n. 6, 97 S.Ct. at 405 (repeating the findings of the district court)) and if no further leave were allowed except under the terms of the plan, then the plan may produce a discriminatory effect which in turn may be proved pretextual. 46 Moreover, within the Title VII realm the Supreme Court has recently supplemented its pretextual analysis of discrimination in maternity policies by drawing a distinction between employer policies that penalize (through loss of employment opportunities attendant upon loss of seniority rights) a woman who becomes pregnant and the Gilbert-Geduldig -type policies which deny her benefits of a health plan during maternity leave. 47 Petitioner's decision not to treat pregnancy as a disease or disability for purposes of seniority retention is not on its face a discriminatory policy. . . . 48 We have recognized, however, that both intentional discrimination and policies neutral on their face but having a discriminatory effect may run afoul of § 703(a)(2) (42 U.S.C. § 2000e(a)(2) (1976)). Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 431, 91 S.Ct. 849, 28 L.Ed.2d 158 (1971). It is beyond dispute that petitioner's policy of depriving employees returning from pregnancy leave of their accumulated seniority acts both to deprive them of employment opportunities and to adversely affect (their) status as an employee. 49 Here, by comparison, petitioner has not merely refused to extend to women a benefit that men cannot and do not receive, but has imposed on women a substantial burden that men need not suffer. The distinction between benefits and burdens is more than one of semantics. We held in Gilbert that § 703(a)(1) (42 U.S.C. § 2000e(a)(1) (1976)) did not require that greater economic benefits be paid to one sex or the other, because of their differing roles in 'the scheme of human existence,'  429 U.S., at 139, n. 17, 97 S.Ct., at 410, n. 17. But that holding does not allow us to read § 703(a)(2) to permit an employer to burden female employees in such a way as to deprive them of employment opportunities because of their different role. 50 Satty, supra, 434 U.S. at 140-42, 98 S.Ct. at 351. 7 51 It is not entirely unthinkable that an analogous distinction might be drawn in the scrutiny of maternity leave policies under the Constitution. We are reluctant, however, to engage in extended analysis of the implications of Satty without an adequate factual record. Plaintiff should be permitted to present the facts and her analysis of them to the district court. 52 Ms. Hanson contends that the Exchange plan imposes a burden upon women who take maternity leave. She alleges that the plan envisioned terminating the position of any woman who took the full eight weeks' pregnancy leave, complaint para. 8, App. 2, and her affidavit states that her inquiries were directed not only at pay and insurance coverage during the leave period but at the continuing status of her position, affidavit para. 10, App. 40. If a pregnant woman under this plan risked both loss of her job by continuing on maternity leave beyond the expiration of her accumulated annual-sick leave, and consequent denial of accumulated continuous service for purposes of longevity compensation, 2 U.S.C. § 60j (1976), should she return, when employees disabled for other reasons do not risk similar losses (because of the catastrophic illness provision), pregnant workers may be saddled with a discriminatory sex-based burden. 53 We note additionally that the plan may burden or discriminatorily affect women in another fashion; that is, women may have to struggle with the plan's ambiguity, risking discharge for seeking clarification, when men would not be subjected to this difficulty. Thus, the ambiguity in the policy itself may amount to a sex-based discrimination, even if the way the policy operates in practice is otherwise entirely valid. 54 Particularly in light of the rapid and not always predictable turns in the evolution of sex discrimination law we are not able to conclude on the basis of the complaint or affidavits that a substantive claim of discrimination in violation of the fifth amendment was clearly foreclosed. The critical point is that the maternity leave policy lent itself to different interpretations and applications, including some that might be determined to be sex-discriminatory. 55 In Davis v. Passman, 442 U.S. 228, 99 S.Ct. 2264, 60 L.Ed.2d 846 (1979), the Supreme Court held, pretermitting the question of immunity, that an implied cause of action exists under the fifth amendment's due process clause for discriminatory denial of employment opportunities based upon sex. Ms. Hanson's complaint can be read to allege such a discriminatory denial. The nexus between the existence of a discriminatory policy and the dismissal of a covered employee who inquires about the policy's application is not, we think, too tenuous to support a finding of causation. An employee dismissed for inquiring about a discriminatory policy may well have been injured by that policy and we disagree with the contrary conclusion of the district court. To rule otherwise would invite evasion of the fifth amendment through artful drafting of purposely ambiguous plans and terminations of employees for indiscretions in asking troublesome questions about the plans. Plaintiff should be allowed to develop, at least by discovery and possibly by trial, her claim based on the discriminatory nature of the policy and its causal relationship to her dismissal. 56