Disparate Impact/ Disparate Treatment Case Study

Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act provides two primary theories of recovery for individuals - these are disparate treatment and disparate impact (sometimes labeled adverse impact . This section of the Civil Rights Code forbids job discrimination based on race , color , or national origin . Members of those protected classes ' cannot lawfully be denied employment opportunities merely because they are Native Americans black , of Vietnamese ancestry , or white , for that matter (Paetzold 2005 ,

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Title VII made overt , blatant employment discrimination illegal . It enforced a

legal theory of disparate treatment . Disparate treatment exists if an employer gives less favorable treatment to employees because of their race , color , religion , sex , or national origin . For example , a retail store that refused to promote black warehouse workers to sales positions , preferring white salespeople to serve predominantly white customers , would be guilty of this kind of discrimination Disparate treatment violates the plain meaning of Title VII

On the other hand , disparate impact is the discrimination caused by policies that apply to everyone and seem neutral but have the effect of disadvantaging a protected group . Such policies are illegal unless strongly job-related and indispensable to conduct of the business Basically , the intention of Title VII was to create a level playing field by prohibiting all discrimination , given the entrenched prejudices of employers

Early disparate treatment law cases sometimes included direct evidence of this conscious hostility or intent to discriminate . Because perceivers can never know what another person actually thinks , the determination of intent required inferences arising from the other person 's behavior . For example , in the early case of Slack v . Havens (1975 ) four Black women claimed that they were illegally discharged because of their race when they refused to perform heavy cleaning duties that were not within their job . Another coworker , a White woman , was excused from performing these duties . Their supervisor Pohansky , who had ed the women to do the heavy work , was known for making statements such as Colored people should stay in their places and Colored folks are hired to clean because they clean better (pp 1092-1093 . The court noted that these statements reflected ill motives for requiring the Black plaintiffs to perform the heavy cleaning . The statements were taken as direct evidence ' of racial animus , i .e conscious intent to discriminate on the basis of race . Under the law direct evidence ' suggests that the commentary from Pohansky was the equivalent of Pohansky telling the women that they were discharged as a result of their being Black . In other words , he was aware of his prejudicial attitudes toward Black persons and consciously treated them differently as a result . The bad intent caused the illegal discrimination to occur , supporting a district court decision (later affirmed ) for the plaintiffs

If Pohansky had not made the statements attributed to him , but had instead told the plaintiffs that they were selected because he truly believed they cleaned better than the White woman (based on his own observation , would the...