Griggs v. Duke Power Company

Griggs v. Duke Power Company

1971

intro

The civil rights act of 1964 made racial discrimination a punishable offense after years of intolerance. Many people, of all races, were adjusting to the integration- often the forced integration- of every aspect of society, including the workplace.

Employers that were quite used to having a completely white staff were now obligated to hire people of color.

Willie Griggs challenged this on December 14th, 1970; when he filed a class action suit against the Duke Power Company.

class action suit - lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member of that group

Defense

Duke Power Company was a public utility company that provided electrical power to both North and South Carolina. In 1955, Duke Power Co. made a high school diploma a requirement for its higher paid jobs. In 1965, the high school diploma requirement was extended to all departments.

This regulation effectively disenfranchised black workers, and thus kept them from moving upwards in the company. This form of de facto segregation was challenged by one man, who represented himself as well as is twelve black coworkers.

That same year, Duke Power Co. allowed employees without high school diplomas to transfer out of the lowest paying department if they could score accordingly on two aptitude tests. The company required employees to score the national median for high schools graduates. The lowest paying department was Labor, which is where all black workers were hired, and this new regulation made it very difficult for them to move up in the workplace.

• Duke Power Co. had a goal of upgrading the overall quality of its work force the requirements were indicative of general intelligence and trainability

o (even where such requirements were not actually necessary for the job being filled)

o This statement was debunked due to lack of evidence of the necessity of the tests

Discussion Questions:

Is it legal to require a high school diploma as well as aptitude tests for higher waged employment?

Should the high school diploma and test scores be required in an integrated workplace considering the magnanimous gap in learning and expertise due to previously segregated school systems?

Can this be considered fair when it is statistically proven that whites will score higher than blacks and thus reap the benefits of transferring to better paid positions?

If you had been on the Supreme Court, would you have ruled in favor of the prosecution or the defense?

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled

that the test was discriminatory.

“What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification. . . . The [Civil Rights] Act proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. . . . If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.”

Griggs and his twelve coworkers were represented by the Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They argued that the new requirement was in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act- a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. It generally applies to employers with 15 or more employees, including federal, state, and local governments.

Prosecution

• testing and high school requirements furthered Duke Power's discriminative agenda white employees with no high school education had been employed directly into the more desirable jobs and/or transferred over prior to the institution of educational restrictions, while blacks, formerly hired into only the labor department, were forced to meet the new requirements to obtain any improvement in job position

• plaintiffs asserted that the requirements were invalid under Title VII because they were not based on any showing that they were job-related, which violated the civil rights act

white non-graduate applicants were also meet the Company's new standards. Griggs did not assert that these individuals were hired on a different basis. Their argument, rather, is that black employees are "frozen" out of better jobs