Opinion ID: 351700
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Union and the Statutes

Text: 46 We must pause further to consider a recurrent theme in NWA's attack on the District Court's findings that particular company practices are discriminatory. NWA contends that union negotiations during the discriminatory era when the practices went unchallenged should be considered compelling evidence of an understanding that the stewardess and purser positions were dissimilar and that pursers accordingly deserved higher pay. The Company implies, in essence, that complaining employees should now be estopped from challenging these practices because their union in which women are dominant agreed to the wages and conditions of employment now impugned. We are not impressed by this argument. 47 The judicial function called into play here is not to assess the union's assumptions, but to determine whether the jobs in question were actually equal within the contemplation of the Equal Pay Act. 105 The evidentiary worth of the union's actions as a reflection of its own underlying evaluation of the characteristics of the two jobs is exceedingly weak. Beyond that, the union's agreement to negotiated terms is hardly evidence of an individual member's appraisal of the skills, efforts, and responsibilities essential to performance of the jobs. Particularly is this so where, as here, the union was bound to represent pursers as well as stewardesses, 106 and took on that responsibility at a time when earlier company policy had already created a status quo under which pursers were more highly paid than stewardesses. Since the union's obligation thenceforth was to seek pay raises benefiting all its members, it obviously was not in a position to alter substantially the position of one constituent group at the expense of another. 107 And when the union did attempt to win better treatment for stewardesses, it encountered stiff resistance from NWA. 108 The only logical inference from this combination of circumstances is that as a matter of strategy not attributable to any belief as to the comparability of the two jobs the union chose to forego a special demand for equality for the stewardesses in order to achieve more pressing bargaining objectives. 48 More fundamentally, union activity cannot strip individual employees of the opportunity to seek vindication of their statutory entitlements in court. Rights established under Title VII and the Equal Pay Act are not rights which can be bargained away either by a union, by an employer, or by both acting in concert. 109 It cannot be gainsaid that NWA played an instrumental role in the negotiations leading to adoption of the discriminatory wage scales, 110 and a collective bargaining agreement perpetuating prior pay discrimination affords the employer no defense to a charge under the Equal Pay Act. 111 We hardly need to mention that if the union also contributed to the discriminatory scheme, the claimant has a cause of action against the union as well. 112