Court Opinion

ID: 9481918
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:35:21.819288+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:39.406594
License: Public Domain

DUMBAULD, District Judge,
dissenting:
Respectfully, and regretfully, I dissent. Appellant portrays to us, in the words of an English poet,
“a melancholy tale
Of things done long ago, and ill-done.” 1
In my interpretation of Congressional legislation2 and authoritative case *1328law3 we confront a situation which we have no power to alleviate or remedy. The ap-pellee telephone company has simply applied a seniority system,4 which it uses as the criterion for according many kinds of employee benefits, and appellant simply did not have enough seniority to qualify for the early retirement which she sought.
A seniority system is simply a method of record-keeping and mathematical calculation which determines how long an employee has worked for the employer. Economics has been called “the dismal science” and a rigorous economist might exclude all time not spent by the employee on actual productive work. Sound public policy and even corporate self-interest, however, surely permit the inclusion of time off work due to job-related injuries or unhealthful working conditions, or, indeed, any disease, disability, or other medical condition preventing the employee from performing his or her job in normal fashion. The telephone company’s plan in the case at bar has always included medical leave but excluded personal leave in computing seniority.
The problem involved in the case at bar stems from the fact that up until legislation enacted by Congress in 19785 the company counted pregnancy leave for women employees as personal leave, not as medical leave.6 Such action was then not unlawful. Upon enactment of the 1978 law the company began, and continues, to count pregnancy leave as medical leave.
The authoritative case law requires current unlawful discrimination in order to support a title VII violation. Bazemore, supra, upon which the majority relies, makes plain that “While recovery may not be permitted for pre-1972 acts of discrimination, to the extent that this discrimination was perpetuated after 1972, liability may be imposed.” 478 U.S. at 395, 106 S.Ct. at 3006. In Bazemore actual disparity between black and white employees with respect to pay continued to exist. In Justice Brennan’s trenchant phrase, “Each week’s paycheck that delivers less to a black than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable under Title VII, regardless of the fact that this pattern was begun prior to the effective date of Title VII.” In Bazemore there was a current discrimination being practiced.
In the case at bar, by contrast, all that the telephone company is currently doing is applying a bona fide seniority system, which is not discriminatory on its face, and is specifically authorized by Congress.7 Such current activity of the company, as previously stated, consists simply of examination of the company’s records and adding up the time the employee has worked for the company, as disclosed by those records. Neither we nor the telephone company can erase or change history. We cannot, like the Communists’ comical claims that they invented all useful inventions now in common use, alter or falsify the past. The company can say, with Pontius Pilate, “What I have written, I have written.”8 Or, as eloquently stated in the familiar passage of the Rubaiyat:
*1329The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.9
Appellant’s grievance is one that belongs to history; it is not a current violation of law.10 Currently there is no discrimination between pregnant and non-pregnant women, nor between pregnant women and men with a sex-specific ailment such as prostate condition (which was mentioned at argument), or men with other mutually available medical reasons for absence from work. Hence I would affirm on the Title VII claim.11
I agree with the majority on the ERISA claim.

. From memory, I think John Ford was the author of these lines.

. See 42 U.S.C. 2000e(k), 2000e-2(a) and 2000e-2(h), which will be discussed more fully hereinafter.

. See United Airlines v. Evans, 431 U.S. 553, 97 S.Ct. 1885, 52 L.Ed.2d 571 (1977), and Bazemore v. Friday, 478 U.S. 385, 106 S.Ct. 3000, 92 L.Ed.2d 315 (1986), which will be discussed more fully hereinafter.

. Surviving from its predecessor company before the celebrated antitrust case resulting in the breakup of the old A.T. & T. system. See U.S. v. Western Electric Co., et at., 552 F.Supp. 131 (D.D.C.1982), aff'd. 460 U.S. 1001, 103 S.Ct. 1240, 75 L.Ed.2d 472 (1983); further opinions in 569 F.Supp. 990 (1983), and 569 F.Supp. 1057 (1983).

. Act of October 31, 1978, 92 Stat. 2076, 42 U.S.C. 2000e(k).

. As explained in appellant’s brief (p. 5):
At the time [of appellant’s pregnancy in 1972], Pacific Telephone's policies required disabled pregnant employees to take personal leaves instead of disability leaves. Persons temporarily disabled for reasons other than pregnancy were given disability leaves while they were unable to work.

. See note 2, supra.

. Jn. 19:22. It is true that the company did adjust appellant’s record to give her several more days (but not enough to qualify her for the early retirement she sought). I think this adjustment simply accepted her doctor’s opinion of when she was able to return to work rather than the company doctor's. To contend that such an adjustment defeats the company’s general reliance on its non-discriminatory seniority plan reminds me of those courts which in my *1329law school days treated a special appearance to object to the jurisdiction of the court as constituting an acceptance of its jurisdiction over the merits of the case.

. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald, tr.) Stanza 71.

. The situation in the case at bar can be illustrated by a hypothetical case. Suppose that appellant were a graduate of Harvard Law School, and that three years after women were first admitted to Harvard Law School, she sought election to the imaginary office of Historian of the Alumni Association, to be eligible for which post the by-laws for over a quarter of a century and without any specific sexual animus have provided that only alumni of five years' standing or more are eligible. [Assume arguen-do also that such a requirement is reasonable (like minimum age for service in the Congress), and also that it would now be unlawful to exclude women from the School but was not prior to the year when they were first admitted during the deanship of Erwin Griswold]. Is it not plain that simply as a matter of chronology she would be ineligible for lack of the five years’ standing required for election to that office?

.As Judge Schroeder states, "the parties agree that the same legal analysis” applies to appellant’s claims under California legislation.