Opinion ID: 2470930
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Application of Johnson and Weber to the Settlement Agreement

Text: In the instant case, the district court held, and the Caldero and Arroyo Intervenors urge, that, except for purposes of layoff seniority, [38] the implementation of the settlement agreement satisfied Johnson and Weber because, they say, it was spurred by a manifest imbalance and it did not unnecessarily trammel the rights of the Brennan Plaintiffs. See NYC Board III, 448 F.Supp.2d at 423-34. In light of Ricci, we agree with the Brennan Plaintiffs that the district court's holding skipped a threshold step in the analysis. That is, to determine whether a voluntary, private, race- and sex-conscious employer action is eligible for the Johnson/Weber defense, courts must now ask whether the race- and sex-conscious action constitutes an affirmative action plan at all. In this case, we answer that question in the negative. [39]
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Ricci indicates that not all voluntary race- or gender-conscious employer action is properly analyzed under Weber and Johnson. In Ricci, the City of New Haven administered a promotional examination for its firefighters. The results yielded a significant racial disparity: according to the promotion rules and by virtue of the test scores, all ten individuals eligible for the then-existing lieutenant vacancies were white; and of the nine individuals eligible for the then-existing captain vacancies, two were Hispanic and seven were white. See 129 S.Ct. at 2666. Because of this racial disparity and, allegedly, because of fear of a disparate-impact lawsuit from black firefighters, the New Haven Civil Service Board did not certify the test results. Id. at 2667-71. A group of white firefighters then sued under § 703(a) for disparate treatment. The Supreme Court, correctly, described New Haven's decision as a race-based action. Id. at 2674. But, even though the Court was addressing a § 703(a) reverse-discrimination suit attacking a voluntary, private race-based action, the majority opinion did not cite Weber or Johnson. Nor did the Court apply the manifest imbalance and unnecessary trammeling factors. Instead, the Court adopted a strong basis in evidence standard: under Title VII, before an employer can engage in intentional discrimination for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, the employer must have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate-impact liability if it fails to take the race-conscious, discriminatory action. Id. at 2677. Ricci thus makes clear that at least some race- or sex-conscious voluntary employer actions are not subject to the affirmative action analysis of Weber and Johnson. [40] See id. at 2700 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (This litigation does not involve affirmative action.). Before Ricci, this Court had held, relying on Weber, that a showing of a prima facie case of employment discrimination through a statistical demonstration of disproportionate racial impact constitutes a sufficiently serious claim of discrimination to serve as a predicate for employer-initiated, voluntary race-conscious remedies. Bushey v. N.Y. State Civil Serv. Comm'n, 733 F.2d 220, 228 (2d Cir.1984) (footnote omitted). Based on that reasoning, we upheld, against a § 703 reverse-discrimination challenge, a public employer's adjustment of promotional examination scores for prison employees, in order to avoid a disparate impact on minority officers. Id. at 227-28. After Ricci, however, the position taken in Bushey is no longer tenable. A prima facie case of disparate impact is not, post- Ricci, an adequate factual predicate for all types of race- or gender-conscious employer actions. At least some race- or gender-conscious actions, such as the rejection of test scores because of their racial distribution, are not affirmative action and therefore cannot be supported by a mere manifest imbalance, or even by a prima facie case of disparate impact.
Since, after Ricci, not all race- or sex-conscious voluntary employer actions constitute affirmative action that might be properly analyzed under Johnson and Weber, we must decide what is an affirmative action plan and what is not. We agree with the Brennan Plaintiffs that in order to be an affirmative action plan, an employer action must benefit all members of a protected class. Although the plan may call for individualized determinations, the plan itself cannot be individualized. Under this definition, the City Defendants' voluntary implementation of the settlement agreement is not an affirmative action plan. The City Defendants, and the intervenors who support them, therefore cannot rely on their affirmative action defense.
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.
Having held that the Johnson/Weber framework does not apply to make-whole relief, we now apply this rule to the City Defendants' voluntary implementation of the disputed portions of the settlement agreement. In our view, the City Defendants' voluntary implementation of the settlement agreement falls on the Stotts side of the Local 28 distinction between affirmative action and make-whole relief. The City Defendants' implementation of the disputed portions of the settlement agreement granted competitive seniority to the Offerees. Competitive seniority is one of the forms of make-whole relief specifically enumerated in Local 28. Moreover, it was competitive seniority that was, in effect, at issue in Stotts, for when Memphis laid off white firefighters instead of black firefighters with less seniority, the city was treating the white firefighters as if they were the less senior employees. And, perhaps even more importantly, the reason why grants of competitive seniority are generally not affirmative action, and therefore are generally limited to make-whole relief, is that retroactive seniority is by its nature individualized. The Offerees were a group of individuals defined by the settlement agreement to include provisional Custodians and CEs who were women or members of certain racial minority groups. Most of them were identified by name in an appendix to the agreement. It cannot be said that the City Defendants provided [employment benefits] to the class as a whole rather than to individual members. Local 28, 478 U.S. at 474, 106 S.Ct. 3019. Instead, what the City Defendants did was tantamount to an award of make-whole relief, id., to individual provisional Custodians and CEs, arguably without adequate regard to whether there was any reason to think they might have been actual victims of discrimination, or to whether there was a strong basis in evidence that a disparate impact suit by them would succeed. The Caldero Intervenors urge that the retroactive seniority awards in this case are affirmative action even though they do not look like the most typical kind. They say the awards are a reasonable, narrower substitute for a general race or gender preference for school transfers. Their view seems to be that if a broad, non-individualized racial preference is permissible provided that there is a manifest imbalance and the plan is narrowly tailored, then race- or gender-conscious relief for only some of the individuals who would have benefited from such a policy, had it been there in the past, must also be permissible. We do not agree. Just as, in the § 706(g) context, courts have the power to order general racial preferences (as in Local 28 ), but not individualized non-remedial relief (as in Stotts ), so, employers also cannot undertake individualized non-remedial relief and validate it by calling it affirmative action. The cases cited by the Caldero Intervenors are not to the contrary. In Jana-Rock Constr., Inc. v. N.Y. State Dep't of Econ. Dev., 438 F.3d 195 (2d Cir.2006), an equal protection case, a construction company owned by an individual of Spanish descent claimed that New York's definition of Hispanic, which was used for purposes of selecting minority-owned businesses to benefit from affirmative action, violated the Equal Protection Clause because it included individuals of Latin American descent while excluding Spaniards. We rejected this challenge, holding that the Equal Protection Clause does not require a state using an affirmative action plan to expand[ ] the preferred class to include other racial and ethnic groups that may have been discriminated against. Id. at 207. Assuming arguendo that this equal protection reasoning applies in the § 703(a) context, Jana-Rock is distinguishable because it deals with the definition of a racial or ethnic beneficiary class. In our case, nobody is saying that the numerous other minority or female individuals who may have applied for Custodian or CE positionsor, for that matter, the minority or female incumbent Custodians and CEs like Miranda plaintiff Ruben Mirandaare not black, Hispanic, Asian, or female. They were excluded from the settlement agreement's benefits, not because they were deemed to be the wrong gender or race, but rather because they were not among the individuals selected for individualized relief. That there may be some flexibility in how a racial or gender class is defined does not undermine the requirement that affirmative action plans provide, on a prospective basis, equal benefits to all members of that beneficiary class. The Caldero Intervenors also rely on Stuart v. Roache, 951 F.2d 446 (1st Cir. 1991) (Breyer, J.), in which the First Circuit upheld under the Equal Protection Clause a race-conscious promotion plan for Boston police officers. The promotion goals for black officers fell short of the projected number of such officers eligible for promotion: they amounted to 15.5% of all sergeants, while the eligible pool contained about 20% black officers. Id. at 454. But, like a differently defined racial or gender class, a smaller promotion goal does not turn affirmative action into individualized relief. A 15.5% goal and a 20% goal are both provided to the class as a whole rather than to individual members. Local 28, 478 U.S. at 474, 106 S.Ct. 3019. The retroactive seniority awards at issue in our case are, instead, expressly provided... to individual members. It is noteworthy, as well, that the Government claims it never intended a Stotts -like result when it entered the settlement agreement. The district court held a hearing to determine the intent of the settlement agreement, and at that hearing Norma Cote, the lawyer who had negotiated the agreement for the City Defendants, testified that she did not recall the Government ever explain[ing] to [her] why they wanted these individuals to get retroactive seniority. NYC Board V, 556 F.Supp.2d at 205-06. Katherine Baldwin, a DOJ supervisor who was not directly involved in the settlement negotiations but who approved the settlement after it was negotiated, testified that it was DOJ policy to seek only make-whole relief for actual victims, and that she would not have approved the settlement if it had contravened that policy. Id. at 206. The district court found, on the basis of this testimony, that the settlement agreement was intended to be limited to make-whole relief. Although the awards may have gone beyond make-whole relief, we are skeptical as to whether an employer can adopt an affirmative-action plan by accident. When an employer adopts an affirmative-action plan, it generally does so consciously, with the purpose not to make identified victims whole, but rather to dismantle prior patterns of employment discrimination and to prevent discrimination in the future, Local 28, 478 U.S. at 474, 106 S.Ct. 3019. When applying strict or heightened scrutiny to race- or gender-based classifications in the Equal Protection Clause context, the Supreme Court has cautioned that [t]he [actor's] justification must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation. United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 533, 116 S.Ct. 2264, 135 L.Ed.2d 735 (1996) (heightened scrutiny); accord Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U.S. 899, 908 n. 4, 116 S.Ct. 1894, 135 L.Ed.2d 207 (1996) (strict scrutiny). The same, we believe, is true when an employer raises the Weber/Johnson affirmative action defense to a reverse-discrimination suit under § 703(a). The Caldero Intervenors, relying on the testimony recited in footnote 43, infra, and the text of the settlement agreement itself, assert that, notwithstanding the district court's finding to the contrary, the parties to the settlement agreement clearly intended to create an affirmative action plan in 1999. According to these Intervenors, it was manifest in 1999 that the settlement agreement would provide retroactive seniority to the specified Offerees without regard to whether there was any evidence that they were actual victims. Therefore, they say, the Government and the City Defendants must have intended to create an affirmative action plan. The Caldero Intervenors' premise is correct, but their conclusion does not follow. The Caldero Intervenors correctly point out that the settlement agreement contained a specific definition of Offeree, and that this definition was not limited to actual victims. They also correctly point out that the Cote testimony, which the district court credited, indicates that the Government and the City Defendants did not perform any individualized investigation of the Offerees to determine the likelihood that they were victims of discrimination. Once it was determined that an individual satisfied the definition of Offeree in the settlement agreement, that individual was offered retroactive seniority. [43] Yet all that this shows is that the Government and the City Defendants may have been less careful than they should have been. Although it was clear from the four corners of the settlement agreement and from the testimony that nobody was checking to make sure that the Offerees were actual victims or even likely victims, it was equally clear that the retroactive seniority awards would be individualized, and therefore, in light of Stotts, not affirmative action. Not every race- or gender-conscious employment benefit that goes beyond make-whole relief is affirmative action; some such benefits, like those at issue here, fall into the impermissible Stotts category instead. Finally, the City Defendants' race- and gender-conscious actions are a poor fit for the wrongs they seek to redress. True affirmative action, like that undertaken voluntarily by the employers in Johnson and Weber and ordered by the court in Local 28, has the power to break down old patterns of discrimination and prevent future discrimination against minorities and women. But affirmative action also has its costs. Most significantly, it is race- or gender-conscious, and it puts non-minority and male individuals at a disadvantage. See Ass'n Against Discrimination in Employment, Inc. v. City of Bridgeport, 647 F.2d 256, 280-81 (2d Cir.1981) (Balanced against the broad equitable power to remedy Title VII violations is a recognition that `the use of racial goals means, in practice, that certain nonminority persons will be kept out solely on account of their race or ethnic background' and that this impinges on the basic principle `that individuals are to be judged as individuals, not as members of particular racial groups.' (quoting EEOC v. Local 638, Local 28 of Sheet Metal Workers Int'l Ass'n, 532 F.2d 821, 827 (2d Cir.1976)) (modifications omitted)). Make-whole relief, likewise, is a powerful remedy for past wrongs. By putting the victims of discrimination where they would have been, but for the discrimination, make-whole relief not only undoes much of the harm caused to the victims themselves, but also provides examples so that others know that they, too, can overcome this country's history of discrimination in the workplace. See Franks v. Bowman Transp. Co., 424 U.S. 747, 763-68 & n. 28, 96 S.Ct. 1251, 47 L.Ed.2d 444 (1976). But make-whole relief is not free either. Someone has to pay for itmost often the non-minority and male employees, as well as the employer. Because of the costs inherent in both affirmative action and make-whole relief, anyone attempting to provide either of these forms of reliefwhether it be a court imposing a remedy under § 706(g) after a Title VII violation has been found, or the Government proposing a settlement to an employer, or an employer acting voluntarilymust be exceptionally careful to ensure that the employer's proposed action is properly tailored to achieve whichever of these two types of remedies for discrimination is sought. That is not to say that one cannot use affirmative action and make-whole relief at the same time; of course one can. See, e.g., Local 28, 478 U.S. at 473 n. 44, 106 S.Ct. 3019 (noting that, along with imposing the affirmative action plan, the district court also gave backpay to specified individual victims of discrimination); cf. Ass'n Against Discrimination in Employment, 647 F.2d at 278 (noting that these two categories [of relief] may overlap to some extent, although their intended functions differ). But a court or employer planning to give out a race- or gender-conscious employment benefit, or a Title VII remedy, should always ask first: What is the purpose of what I am doing? (1) Am I trying to give make-whole relief to individual people who I think are victims of past discrimination, (2) am I trying to implement a non-individualized, class-wide affirmative action plan to dismantle prior patterns of discrimination and prevent future discrimination, or (3) am I trying to do both? Only after these questions have been answered can an appropriately tailored plan or plans be put in place. The Government and the City Defendants should have considered these questions before taking action. Instead, according to the testimony that the district court credited, the Government never explained why it wanted the Offerees to get retroactive seniority, and the City Defendants never asked. [44] The necessity of avoiding Stotts -like remedies,that is, non-remedial, individualized, race- or sex-conscious employment benefitsis not merely an abstract, doctrinal matter. It affects real people in tangible ways. In the instant case, Ruben Miranda, the plaintiff in Miranda, may be the clearest example of how the City Defendants' remedy does not fit. He is a Hispanic male. He studied for, took, and passed Exam 5040, which allegedly discriminated against Hispanics. As a reward for overcoming this hurdle, he was hired as a Custodianonly to be told, some years later, that other, newly appointed Custodians, a specified group of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, would be put ahead of him in seniority. As a result, he could be laid off before these newcomers would be, and he wouldand, as it turns out, didlose school transfers to them. Thus, a Hispanic Custodian was hampered in attaining his career goals, including a transfer to a larger and higher-paying school, because of a settlement agreement that the Caldero and Arroyo Intervenors insist is an affirmative action plan for, among others, Hispanics. [45] For all these reasons, while some or all of the retroactive seniority awards may be defensible on some other ground, they are not defensible as part of an affirmative action plan. The City Defendants therefore cannot use the Weber/Johnson defense to the Brennan Plaintiffs' § 703(a) prima facie case.