• 480 U.S. 616 (1987)
• Vote: 6–3
• For the Court: Brennan
• Concurring: O'Connor and Stevens
• Dissenting: White, Scalia, and Rehnquist
In 1978 the Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County, California, created an affirmative action plan to bring about fair representation in its work force of women, minorities, and disabled people. Affirmative action refers to programs or policies to provide opportunities to individuals on the basis of membership in certain groups, such as racial, ethnic, or gender categories that have been discriminated against in the past. The Santa Clara plan did not set aside a certain number of jobs for minorities, women, or the disabled. Rather, it set annual goals as guidelines for decisions about hiring and promoting workers so that eventually there would be “a work force whose composition reflected the proportion of minorities and women in the labor force.”
In 1979 the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency gave notice of a vacancy for the job of road dispatcher. This was a craftworker position, a high-level, skilled job category. None of the 238 jobs in the agency's craftworker category was held by a woman. Paul Johnson and Diana Joyce were the leading candidates, among 12 applicants, for the vacant position.
The interviewers rated both Johnson and Joyce as well qualified. Johnson, however, had a slightly higher job interview score than Joyce did, and the selection panel recommended that he get the position. Nevertheless, Diana Joyce got the job. So Johnson filed a complaint under the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. He claimed that he was denied the job because of his sex.
The Issue
This was the first case to test the legality of sex-based affirmative action plans under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Did the Santa Clara affirmative action plan violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits an employer from depriving “any individual of employment opportunities… because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”? Did Santa Clara's voluntary sex-based affirmative action plan deprive Johnson of his 14th Amendment right to “equal protection of the laws”?
Opinion of the Court
The Supreme Court upheld the Santa Clara Transportation Agency's affirmative action plan. Justice William Brennan wrote that it could be legal under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to remedy imbalances of female and male workers in a skilled job category. This affirmative action plan was legal, Brennan wrote, because it merely set goals but did not establish quotas for hiring female employees. Further, this plan recognized gender as only one of several factors in decisions about hiring and promotion. Finally, the plan was acceptable because it was only a temporary means to overcome past discrimination against workers based on sex.
Dissent Justice
Antonin Scalia argued that this sex-based affirmative action plan was in conflict with the specific words of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He wrote, “The court today completes the process of converting this [Civil Rights Act of 1964] from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for employment discrimination, to a guarantee that it often will. [W]e effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite incompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.”
Significance
For the first time, the Court decided that a voluntary sex-based affirmative action plan can be used to overcome the effects of past job discrimination based on gender. Further, the Johnson decision clearly endorsed affirmative action as a remedy for past discrimination, as long as it is temporary.
See also Affirmative action; Equality under the Constitution
Sources
- Melvin I. Urofsky, A Conflict of Rights: The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action (New York: Scribners, 1991)
