Court Opinion

ID: 9430686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:20.771662+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:25.787982
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
dissenting.
For several reasons, I am unable to join either the Court’s opinion or judgment.
Title VII forbids racially discriminatory employment practices. The general proscription of § 703 is that an employer may not discriminate against either blacks or whites in either hiring or promotion. An employer may not, without violating Title VII, simply decide for itself or in agreement with its employees to have a racially balanced work force and displace *532employees of any race to make room for employees of another race. Even without displacing any present employees, Title VII would forbid quota hiring or promotion such as reserving every third vacancy or promotion for a black, or for a white for that matter. And if this is the case, it must be wholly untenable to permit a court to enter a consent decree requiring conduct that would violate Title VII.
Under the present law, an employer may adopt or be ordered to adopt racially discriminatory hiring or promotion practices favoring actual or putative employees of a particular race only as a remedy for its own prior discriminatory practices disfavoring members of that race. The Court’s opinion pays scant attention to this necessary predicate for race-conscious practices, whether judicially imposed or voluntarily adopted, favoring one race over another. Instead, the Court seeks to avoid the issue whether the consent decree at issue violates the Title VII rights of nonminority employees by limiting itself to holding that § 706(g), which deals with remedies for violations of Title VII, has no application whatsoever to agreements and consent decrees such as are involved in this case. In so doing, the Court not only ignores the fact that the intervenor in this case has never restricted its claims to those based on § 706(g), see Pet. for Cert. 7, but also adopts an unduly restricted view of the place of § 706(g) in the statute.
The Court purports to find support for its position in Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U. S. 193 (1979), but this is not my understanding of that case. There, it was clear that the company had been hiring only those craftworkers with prior experience and that the craft unions had excluded blacks. Hence, the company’s craftworkers were almost totally white. The company and the union negotiated a contract to break this discriminatory pattern, and we held that there was no violation of Title VII. But the company’s prior discriminatory conduct provided the predicate for a temporary remedy favoring black employees. The Weber opinion *533stated that the agreement was a voluntary, private, race-conscious effort to abolish traditional patterns of segregation and hierarchy, id., at 204, and held that the agreement was not an undue attempt to overcome these racial barriers. The case did not hold that without such a predicate, an employer, alone or in agreement with the union, may adopt race-conscious hiring practices without violating Title VII.
Under current law, an employer who litigates a Title VII case to judgment cannot lose unless it is proved that it has discriminated within the meaning of §703. It is therefore untenable to conclude, as the Court does, that a district court may nevertheless enter a consent decree ordering an employer to hire or promote on a racial basis in a way that could not be ordered after a contested trial. Title VII was not enacted to protect employers against themselves, but to protect applicants and employees from racially discriminatory practices. There is no statutory authority for concluding that if an employer desires to discriminate against a white applicant or employee on racial grounds he may do so without violating Title VII but may not be ordered to do so if he objects. In either case, the harm to the discriminatee is the same, and there is no justification for such conduct other than as a permissible remedy for prior racial discrimination practiced by the employer involved. The Court should not deprecate that requirement and in effect make Title VII’s proscription a one-way racial street, thus disserving the goal of ending racial discrimination in this country.
I agree with Justice Rehnquist that the consent decree in this case was not immune from examination under § 706(g). I also agree with Justice Brennan’s opinion in Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC, ante, p. 421, that in Title VII cases enjoining discriminatory practices and granting relief only to victims of past discrimination is the general rule, with relief for nonvictims being reserved for particularly egregious conduct that a district court concludes cannot be cured by injunctive relief alone. I disagree, however, with the Court in this case *534that we need not decide whether the remedy conforms to the limitations of § 706(g); and for the reasons stated below, I am convinced that the remedy imposed in this ease exceeds the limits of a permissible remedy for the discriminatory practices that were recited in the consent decree and that required a remedy consonant with the provisions of Title VII. Even if I agreed that § 706(g) is beside the point in the case, the Court itself concedes that there are limits to the racial discrimination that an employer and a union may voluntarily visit upon nonminorities, ante, at 520-521, n. 10, and those limits, which in my view run parallel to those placed on judicial decrees by § 706(g), are exceeded in this case.
This case primarily concerns promotions in the Cleveland Fire Department. Reciting that there had been discrimination against minorities in promotions, but identifying no actual victims of such discrimination, the decree required that those proved eligible for promotion after examination be divided into two lists, one list comprising minority eligibles and one list made up of nonminority eligibles. Promotions were to proceed two at a time, one from the minority list and one from the nonminority roster. Of course, the names on each list were ranked in accordance with seniority and examination results. It is also evident, and it is conceded, that under the decree minority eligibles would be promoted who would not have been promoted had the lists been merged; that is, black and Hispanic firefighters who would have ranked below white firefighters eligible for promotion actually displaced and were preferred over the latter on a strictly racial basis. This kind of leapfrogging minorities over senior and better qualified whites is an impermissible remedy under Title VII, just as in Firefighters v. Stotts, 467 U. S. 561 (1984), laying off senior whites was an excessive remedy for an employer’s prior discrimination, and just as in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 476 U. S. 267 (1986), the Equal Protection Clause did not require or permit the layoff of white teachers *535in order to maintain a particular racial balance in the work force.
Section 706(g) provides in part:
“If the court finds that the respondent has intentionally engaged in or is intentionally engaging in an unlawful employment practice charged in the complaint, the court may enjoin the respondent from engaging in such unlawful employment practice, and order such affirmative action as may be appropriate, which may include, but is not limited to, reinstatement or hiring of employees, with or without back pay (payable by the employer, employment agency, or labor organization, as the case may be, responsible for the unlawful employment practice), or any other equitable relief as the court deems appropriate.” 42 U. S. C. §2000e-5(g).
None of the racially preferred blacks in the present case was shown to have been a victim of discriminatory promotion practices; and none of the whites denied promotion was shown to have been responsible or in any way implicated in the discriminatory practices recited in the decree. In view of the burdens placed on nonminority employees by the decree, the remedy imposed was inequitable, could not have been ordered after a trial, and is no more valid when agreed to by the employer but contested by those who claim their right not to be discriminated against on racial grounds.