McGraw-Hill/Irwin

Copyright 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chapter 17

Civil Rights at Work

This chapter:
Discusses employment discrimination.
Explains the evolution of laws and methods
used to fight it over the years.

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Civil Rights in the Workplace

Opening Case
Brooke Waits worked hard and her job was part of her.
Away from work, Waits was open about being a lesbian, but
at work she sensed that revealing herself would estrange her
from the others.
After being fired, Waits testified before Congress.
Since the 1970s, supporters in Congress have tried to pass a
law extending workplace protections to victims of bias such
as Waits.
The Employment Non-discrimination Act of 2007 seeks to
make
it illegal to take any adverse job action based on sexual
orientation.
This story is part of the long history of struggle for civil rights
protections in the workplace.
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A Short History of Workplace

Civil Rights The Colonial Era
Employment discrimination in America can
be dated from 1619.
In the Declaration of Independence,
unalienable rights are natural rights.
Natural rights exist on a higher plane than civil
rights, which are rights bestowed by
governments on their citizens.

The unalienable rights statement in the

Declaration distills a body of doctrine know
as the American Creed.
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Civil War and

Reconstruction
In the United States, the issue of slavery rose to a
crisis in the Civil War.
In 1863, President Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation.
Following the war, Congress passed three
constitutional amendments designed to protect the
rights of former slaves.
These amendments were supplemented by a
series of civil rights acts passed by Congress.
With little enforcement of these laws, southern
states adopted segregationist statutes called Jim
Crow laws.
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Other Groups Face Employment

Discrimination
Native Americans were widely treated as
inferior.
When Mexico ceded Texas, 90,000
Hispanics became U.S. residents, but were
victims of a range of discriminatory actions.
In 1851, Chinese laborers began to enter the
country to be met by economic and racial
discrimination.
The earliest Japanese immigrants found
similar inhospitality.
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The Civil Rights Cases

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed to prevent
racial discrimination.
There was still widespread discrimination against
freed slaves by business and soon a series of
cases reached the Supreme Court.
These cases were consolidated into one opinion by
the Court in 1883 and called the Civil Rights Cases.
The Civil Rights Cases so narrowed the meaning of
the Fourteenth Amendment that it became irrelevant
to a broad range of economic and social bias.

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Plessy v. Ferguson
The Separate Car Act was passed by Louisiana in 1890.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, who was 7/8 Caucasian and
1/8 African, was asked to move to the nonwhite coach.
Plessy refused and was taken to a New Orleans jail.
Plessy brought suit, claiming he was entitled to equal
protection of the laws as stated in the Fourteenth
Amendment.
The Supreme Court disagreed.
The ruling completed the destruction of the Fourteenth
Amendment as a mechanism to guarantee civil rights.

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Long Years of
Discrimination
Southern legislators were
emboldened
by Plessy.
Jim Crow laws spread.
Black workers faced blatant
discrimination.
These customs spread to the north.

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The Civil Rights Act

of 1964
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new
civil rights movement arose.
The pressures of this movement led to
many social reforms, among them passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Its Title VII prohibits discrimination in any
aspect of employment.
Title VII also created the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission.
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Disparate Treatment and

Disparate Impact
Title VII enforced a legal theory of
disparate treatment.
When Title VII went into effect,
employees could no longer engage in
outwardly visible displays of
discrimination.
The flaw in Title VII was that it
contained no weapon to fight disparate
impact.
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The Griggs Case

In Griggs v. Duke Power, the Supreme Court held
that diploma requirements and tests that screened
out blacks or other protected classes were illegal
unless employers could show that they were related
to job performance or justified by business necessity.
The Griggs decision, and the legal theory of
disparate impact it created, was necessary for Title
VII to work.
In 1978 the EEOC defined illegal disparate impact
for employers with a guideline know as the 80
percent rule.

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Affirmative Action
The origin of most affirmative action in
corporations is Executive Order 11246.
The Labor Department issued Order No.
4, which requires federal contractors to
analyze major job categories to find out if
they are using women and minorities in
the same proportion as they are present
in the area labor force.
If protected groups are
underrepresented, companies must
set up goals and timetables for hiring,
retention, and promotion.

Affirmative
Action
Policies that
seek out,
encourage, and
sometimes give
preferential
treatment to
employees in
groups
protected by
Title VIII

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The Supreme Court

Changes Title VII
The first high-profile challenge came from Allan
Bakke, a white male denied admission to medical
school, claiming reverse discrimination.
The Supreme Court ruled in his favor.
A white laboratory analyst, Brian Weber, brought
suit against Kaiser Aluminum claiming a promotion
selection procedure violated Title VII.
The Court ruled against him saying Kaisers
affirmative action plan embodied the spirit of
the law.

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The Supreme Court Changes

Title VII (continued)
These rulings established important criteria
for judging the legality of subsequent
affirmative action programs:
A plan must be designed to break down historic
patterns of race or sex discrimination.
The plan must not create an absolute bar to the
advance of white employees.
The plan must not require the discharge of white
workers.
The plan should be flexible and temporary.

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The Affirmative Action

Debate
Utilitarian considerations.
Ethical theories of justice raise
questions about the ultimate fairness
of affirmative action.
Affirmative action may be debated in
light of ethical theories on rights.

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Women in the Workplace

Around the world more women work than ever before.
In 2006 there were 1.2 billion women in the global labor
force, making up 40 percent of the total.
The number of women at work varies around the globe with
economic development and cultural tradition.
Participation rates are high in the least-developed countries,
where poverty pushes women into paid labor
At 70 percent, the United States has the second-highest
female labor force participation among high-income nations.
Lowest participation is found in Arab nations.

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Gender Attitudes at Work

The new feminist perspective asserted that
working women were entitled to the same
jobs, rights, and ambitions as men.
Men who believed in traditional sex-role
stereotypes thought that women were too
emotional to manage well; lacked ambition,
logic, and toughness; and could not sustain
career drive because of family obligations.
In the U.S. belief in the traditional
stereotype has eroded but proves durable.
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Subtle Discrimination
Many workplace cultures are based on masculine
values.
In blue-collar settings, sexism may be blatant;
some men will openly express biases.
In managerial settings, sex discrimination is
usually subtle, even unintentional.
Masculine cultures underlie many kinds of
differential treatment.
Men and women learn different ways of speaking
in childhood. Later in life these conversation styles
carry over into the workplace, where they can
place women at a disadvantage.
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Harassment
Many women experience sexual harassment
at some time in their careers.
Men use sex-based harassment to define
and enforce gender distinctions
The EEOC guidelines define two situations
whre harassment is illegal:
Quid pro quo
Hostile environment
The range of conduct that can create a hostile
environment has expanded to become very broad, but is
not subject to precise definition
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Occupational Segregation

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Compensation
Although the gender wage gap is closing, it is
persistent for three reasons:
Occupational segregation places women in femaledominated occupations that tend to be lower paying
than male-dominated ones.
Women pay a heavy earnings penalty for child
bearing and child rearing, activities that interrupt
careers.
The gap reflects elements of sex discrimination.
The pay gap between men and women is worldwide,
although in most other nations it is lower than in the
United States.
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Corporate Efforts to
Promote Diversity
Many large firms go beyond compliance to
promote workforce diversity.
Diversity management is a broader effort than
affirmative action.
Advocates promote diversity management using
two arguments:
It is an ethical action needing no justification beyond
its inherent goodness.
It can strengthen business.

To succeed, a diversity management program

must be part of the corporate management
system.
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Key Components of a Diversity

Management Program

Leadership
Change in the organization structure
Training programs
Mentors
Data collection
Policy changes
Reward systems
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Concluding Observations
The first national effort to end workplace
discrimination began during the Civil War.
This visionary effort was defeated by social
values contrary to the laws.
In the 1960s, a second effort began with passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Today the accumulated corpus of antidiscrimination
law is massive, complex, and controversial but
overall, it works.
Yet, more needs to be done.

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