Opinion ID: 77051
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Timely-Filing Requirement

Text: 35 Under § 706 of Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(e)(1), only those unlawful employment practice[s] that are complained of in a timely-filed charge of discrimination to the EEOC can form the basis for Title VII liability. See, e.g., City of Hialeah v. Rojas, 311 F.3d 1096, 1102 (11th Cir.2002) (If the victim of an employer's unlawful employment practice does not file a timely complaint, the unlawful practice ceases to have legal significance, and the employer is entitled to treat the unlawful practice as if it were lawful.). For claims arising in so-called non-deferral states, such as Alabama, to be timely, the applicable charge must have been filed within 180 days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred. § 2000e-5(e)(1). 13 Therefore, only those practice[s] that occurred within 180 days of the operative EEOC charge can form the basis for Title VII liability. 36 The parties both assume for purposes of this appeal that the operative charge in this case is the EEOC questionnaire Ledbetter filed on March 25, 1998, and that her pay claim — which was included in her formal charge filed in July 1998, but not the questionnaire — should relate back to the date of the questionnaire. 14 Measuring from March 25, 1998, the 180-day period began to run on September 26, 1997. The question, therefore, is whether Ledbetter made out a claim for disparate treatment in pay based on conduct occurring after September 26, 1997. 37
38 The Supreme Court substantially clarified the operation of Title VII's timely-filing requirement in National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101, 122 S.Ct. 2061, 153 L.Ed.2d 106 (2002), so we begin our analysis there. In Morgan, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider whether, and under what circumstances, a Title VII plaintiff may file suit on events that fall outside [the timely-filing] period. Id. at 105, 122 S.Ct. at 2068. On that question, the Court reached two different answers, one for each of the two types of claims at issue in the case: (1) disparate treatment and retaliation claims challenging discrete discriminatory or retaliatory acts, and (2) a claim alleging a hostile work environment. See id. 39 The Court held that the timely-filing requirement erects an absolute bar on recovery for discrete discriminatory or retaliatory acts occurring outside the limitations period. In doing so, it rejected the Ninth Circuit's serial violations doctrine, eschewing the notion that so long as one act falls within the charge filing period, [time-barred] discriminatory and retaliatory acts that are plausibly or sufficiently related to that act may also be considered for purposes of liability. Id. at 114, 122 S.Ct. at 2072-73. The Court reasoned that discrete acts of discrimination such as termination, failure to promote, denial of transfer, or refusal to hire are easy to identify, and each constitutes a separate actionable `unlawful employment practice.' Id. at 114, 122 S.Ct. at 2073. Because each is an identifiable violation of Title VII, [e]ach discrete discriminatory act starts a new clock for filing charges alleging that act. Id. at 113, 122 S.Ct. at 2072. In such cases, there is no issue about when, in the language of the statute, the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(e)(1). It occurred on the day that it happened. Morgan, 536 U.S. at 109, 122 S.Ct. at 2070. A party, therefore, must file a charge within either 180 or 300 days of the date of a discrete discriminatory or retaliatory act or lose the ability to recover for it, id. at 113, 122 S.Ct. at 2072, regardless of whether the time-barred acts are closely related to acts alleged in a timely-filed charge. Pre-limitations acts can be used, where relevant, as background evidence in support of [the] timely claim, Id. at 113, 122 S.Ct. at 2072, but they cannot themselves form the basis for liability. 40 The Court distinguished claims in which the plaintiff alleges that he or she was subjected to a hostile work environment. For those claims, the Court held, consideration of the entire scope of [the] claim, including behavior alleged outside the statutory time period, is permissible for the purposes of assessing liability, so long as an act contributing to that hostile environment takes place within the statutory time period. Id. at 105, 122 S.Ct. at 2068. The Court reasoned that 41 [h]ostile environment claims are different in kind from discrete acts. Their very nature involves repeated conduct. The unlawful employment practice therefore cannot be said to occur on any particular day. It occurs over a series of days or perhaps years and, in direct contrast to discrete acts, a single act of harassment may not be actionable on its own. Such claims are based on the cumulative effect of individual acts. 42 Id. at 115, 122 S.Ct. at 2073 (citations omitted). Given, the Court said, that the incidents constituting a hostile work environment are part of one unlawful employment practice, the employer may be liable for all acts that are part of this single claim. Id. at 118, 122 S.Ct. at 2075. 43 We think it clear that pay claims of the type Ledbetter asserts are governed by that part of the Morgan decision addressing claims alleging discrete acts of discrimination. It is fundamental that for a Title VII plaintiff to prevail on any type disparate treatment claim, he or she must point to some specific, conscious conduct that was tainted by the alleged improper consideration (be it race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1)). In a case in which the plaintiff complains of discriminatory pay, there are only two possible sources of such conduct: the decisions setting the plaintiff's salary level or pay rate, and the issuance of paychecks reflecting those decisions. Whether it is a pay-setting decision or the issuance of a confirming paycheck that is viewed as the operative act of discrimination, the act is, like termination, failure to promote, denial of transfer, or refusal to hire, Morgan, 536 U.S. at 114, 122 S.Ct. at 2073, discrete in time, easy to identify, and — if done with the requisite intent — independently actionable. If an employee is denied a raise, given a pay cut, or hired at a deflated pay grade because of a prohibited consideration, the statute is violated and the employee can file suit the moment the decision is made. The decision would be no less unlawful if the employee were to quit the next day in exasperation and never receive a paycheck reflecting her unlawful pay rate; proving damages might be problematic, but establishing liability would not. Similarly, if the act complained of is the issuance of a discrete discriminatory paycheck (or paychecks), then the issuance of the challenged paycheck completes the alleged unlawful employment practice for purposes of the timely-filing requirement. Pay claims do not, therefore, have those characteristics that led the Court to devise a separate rule governing the timing of hostile work environment claims: The unlawful employment practice can be said to occur on a particular day (though it may be repeated on multiple days), and a single discriminatory act is actionable on its own. The alleged discriminatory behaviors need not accumulate to some critical mass to become actionable. 15 44 Under Morgan, therefore, Ledbetter can state a timely cause of action for disparate pay only to the extent that the discrete acts of discrimination of which she complains occurred within the limitations period created by her EEOC questionnaire. Any acts of discrimination affecting her salary occurring before then are time-barred.
45 It is undisputed that Ledbetter's claim is not entirely time barred. In February 1998, after Ledbetter had transferred to the Final Finish area to assume the Technology Engineer position, her pay level was reviewed by Kelly Owen, who decided not to recommend that she receive any raise. That decision was affirmed by higher level management at the plant. Because an affirmative decision directly affecting Ledbetter's pay was made within the limitations period (i.e., after September 26, 1997), she may at least challenge that decision as discriminatory. The claim is identical in form to the raise-denial claims courts routinely consider. 46 The rub is that Ledbetter did not want to stop at the 1998 raise decision because doing so would have (1) limited the damages she could have recovered, (2) rendered useless evidence relevant only to other persons in the plant upon which she wanted the jury to rely, and (3) forced her to prove that Owen acted with discriminatory intent. Instead, what Ledbetter did — what the district court allowed her to do — was to point to the substantial disparity between her salary and those of the male Area Managers in Tire Assembly at the end of her career, put on circumstantial evidence that persons having control over her pay earlier in her career had discriminatory animus toward women, show that other female Area Managers in the plant were paid less than their male co-workers, and then put the onus on Goodyear to provide a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for every dollar of difference between her salary and her male co-workers' salaries. This necessarily put at issue every salary-related decision made during Ledbetter's nineteen-year career. 47 To support her argument that she was entitled to prove her claim in this way, Ledbetter cites a series of pre- Morgan cases that, attempting to follow the Supreme Court's decision in Bazemore v. Friday, 478 U.S. 385, 106 S.Ct. 3000, 92 L.Ed.2d 315 (1986), essentially carved out a doctrine for applying the timely-filing requirement to disparate pay claims. Though the circuits took slightly different approaches, many held prior to Morgan that a Title VII claim challenging an employee's pay was not time-barred so long as the plaintiff received within the limitations period at least one paycheck implementing the pay rate the employee challenged as unlawful. 17 48 Assuming that these cases survive Morgan, they do not stand for the broad proposition Ledbetter urges. It is one thing to say that a claim is not entirely time-barred because the discriminatory decision being challenged continued to be periodically implemented through paychecks issued within the limitations period. It is quite another to say that the bare issuance of a lower-than-wished-for paycheck within the limitations period opens the door for a full inquiry into the motivations of every person who ever made a decision contributing to the plaintiff's pay level as it existed during the limitations period. In other words, the cases on which Ledbetter relies hold simply that pay claims are not time-barred if (allegedly) unlawful paychecks were issued within the limitations period; they do not speak to how far back in time the plaintiff may reach in looking for the intentionally discriminatory act that is the central, requisite element of every successful disparate treatment claim. E.g., Denney v. City of Albany, 247 F.3d 1172, 1182 (11th Cir.2001) (Disparate treatment claims require proof of discriminatory intent[,] either through direct or circumstantial evidence.) 49 Of course, the necessary implication of these cases is that a plaintiff whose claim is preserved by the continued issuance of improperly low paychecks can look some distance back in time for the underlying, intentionally discriminatory decision. Unless there is a claim that the person — or, more likely today, the computer — who actually issued the paychecks in question did so with intent to discriminate, the operative act of discrimination will always be, not the act of issuing paychecks, but the act of making the underlying decision about what the plaintiff should be paid. Thus, if a claim is timely only because of the continued receipt of paychecks within the limitations period, it must be that the plaintiff can point to a decision outside the limitations period as the offending act. 50 There must, however, be some limit on how far back the plaintiff can reach. If it were otherwise, the timely-filing requirement would be completely illusory in many pay-related Title VII cases. So long as the plaintiff received one paycheck within the limitations period that was based on the pay level he or she objects to, the plaintiff could effectively call into question every decision made contributing to his or her being paid at that level. This result would be directly contrary to the central purposes of the timely-filing requirement: to encourag[e] prompt resolution of employment disputes, Hill v. Ga. Power Co., 786 F.2d 1071, 1076 n. 9 (11th Cir.1986), and to protect employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past, Del. State College v. Ricks, 449 U.S. 250, 256-57, 101 S.Ct. 498, 503, 66 L.Ed.2d 431 (1980). 51 Limits on how far into the past the plaintiff can look for an intentionally discriminatory decision are most obviously warranted where, as here, the employee's pay level was subjected to periodic re-assessment through regularly scheduled raise decisions. In such cases, the timing of the employer's compensation system creates one, obviously preferable opportunity for an employee to make any pay-related complaints: the point at which the employee's salary is reviewed and he or she is dissatisfied with the result. We think, therefore, that at least in cases in which the employer has a system for periodically reviewing and re-establishing employee pay, an employee seeking to establish that his or her pay level was unlawfully depressed may look no further into the past than the last affirmative decision directly affecting the employee's pay immediately preceding the start of the limitations period. Other, earlier decisions may be relevant, but only to the extent they shed light on the motivations of the persons who last reviewed the employee's pay, at the time the review was conducted. See, e.g., Downey v. So. Nat. Gas Co., 649 F.2d 302, 305 (5th Cir.1981) (Although Downey's claims relating to the 1974 demotion and failure to transfer are time barred, these actions should be allowed as evidence on the question of whether Downey was constructively discharged. We observe that `(w)hile some or most of this evidence may concern time-barred conduct, it is relevant, and may be used to illuminate current practices which, viewed in isolation, may not indicate discriminatory motives.' (quoting Crawford v. Western Electric Co., 614 F.2d 1300, 1314 (5th Cir.1980))). 18 52 Despite Ledbetter's contentions, our decision in Calloway v. Partners National Health Plans, 986 F.2d 446 (11th Cir.1993), is not to the contrary. In Calloway, the plaintiff, a black woman, had accepted a secretarial position at a salary lower than her equally or less qualified white predecessor had been offered nine months prior. In addition, when the plaintiff left the company, the defendant replaced her with another white woman of equal or lesser qualifications whom it paid more than it had the plaintiff. The limitations period created by the EEOC charge supporting the plaintiff's claim did not reach back to the date she was hired. The defendant therefore argued that the claim was barred because the only conduct that occurred within the limitations period — the issuance of paychecks implementing the plaintiff's disparate pay rate — was simply the present consequence of a time-barred act of discrimination: hiring the plaintiff at a discriminatory initial wage rate. Id. at 448; see also United Air Lines, Inc. v. Evans, 431 U.S. 553, 558, 97 S.Ct. 1885, 1889, 52 L.Ed.2d 571 (1977). The district court found that the plaintiff had proven intentional discrimination in her initial wage assignment, but it agreed with the defendant that the claim was time-barred. 53 A panel of this court reversed. Relying on Bazemore and on our own version of the continuing violations doctrine, the panel reasoned that [w]hen the claim is one for discriminatory wages, the violation exists every single day the employee works [for the wages she challenges as unlawful]. Calloway, 986 F.2d at 448-49 (citing Bazemore, 478 U.S. at 396, n. 6, 106 S.Ct. at 3006, n. 6.). Thus, the defendant discriminated against [the plaintiff] not only on the day that it offered her less than her white predecessor, but also on every day of her employment. Id. (citing Bazemore, 478 U.S. at 395, 106 S.Ct. at 3006 (Each week's paycheck that delivers less to a black than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable under Title VII ....)). 54 Ledbetter argues that because the plaintiff in Calloway was allowed to prove her claim based on the intentional discrimination reflected in her initial wage assignment, she should be allowed to do the same; if she can prove intentional discrimination in any pay decision during her career, even the setting of her initial salary, she can effectively borrow that intent and impute it to the paychecks she received during the limitations period. Calloway, however, did not involve, as this case does, an employee whose pay had been reviewed and re-established over a dozen times. There is no indication in the opinions of the district court or the panel in Calloway that the employer had in place any sort of system like Goodyear's, giving the plaintiff regular opportunities to complain of improperly deflated pay and to seek a raise. Indeed, there is no indication that any decisions were made about the Calloway plaintiff's pay rate between the initial date of hire and the start of the limitations period. In such cases, if a claim is allowed to go forward only because paychecks were received within the limitations period, then of course any intentional discrimination will have to be located in the initial wage assignment. In short, we believe that Calloway belongs in a different category of pay-related cases and is fully consistent with the rule we announce today. 55 We think Morgan may indicate that the paycheck-as-discriminatory-act cases, including Calloway, read Bazemore too broadly and that it therefore remains an open question whether a disparate-pay plaintiff, in contrast to a pattern-and-practice pay plaintiff, should be able to challenge any decision made outside the limitations period. 19 We need not address that question today, however. Even if we assume that the paychecks Ledbetter received within the limitations period allowed her to attack as discriminatory the last affirmative decision affecting her pay before the beginning of the period, that decision — the Gadsden plant administrators' decision not to allow Jerry Jones to consider her for a raise in 1997 — is not one that any reasonable jury could find discriminatory.