United Steelworkers of America v. Brian Weber

United Steelworkers of America v. Brian Weber

Description

United Steelworkers of America v. Brian Weber is the case in which the Supreme Court established the legality of voluntary race-based affirmative action in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case turned on statutory interpretation, and the battle between Justice Brennan and Justice Rehnquist is such a classic in that field that the leading casebook on Legislation uses it to great effect as its opening case study. Yet Weber has begun to disappear from Employment Discrimination casebooks. Johnson v. Santa Clara County Transportation Agency, which reaffirmed Weber and extended its rationale to sex-based affirmative action, is sometimes presented by casebook editors as the “lead” case on the topic. But only by telling the story of Weber can we see the historical context out of which voluntary affirmative action emerged and came before the Court. One part of the story, told well in existing sources, is that affirmative action was the response of employers to the threat of lawsuits and of loss of lucrative federal contracts for having too-white workforces. Three Federal anti-discrimination agencies—the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) (housed in the Department of Labor, DOL)—had their hand in the field of racial discrimination in employment. So did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its independent litigation offshoot, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the major forces behind many landmark private Title VII cases. All came, for reasons more pragmatic than political, to pay attention to the numerical bottom line when setting their prosecutorial and investigative priorities. Faced with presumptive guilt-by-the-numbers, employers became convinced that hiring-by-the-numbers was the best policy. Employers adopted “voluntary” affirmative action policies to serve their own self-interest, at the expense of the interest of their white workers, who had no voice in the process. As a one-paragraph account, I have little objection to this version of the story. But it misses one important player. Government, public interest groups, employers, black workers, white workers are all there. But what about labor unions? Much of early Title VII enforcement aimed at heavily-unionized sectors of the economy. Voluntary affirmative action in the unionized sector could only be achieved through the collective bargaining process, either with union agreement or in the face of union strike threats. Many important traditional craft unions continued to discriminate for years after Title VII was enacted, and became the test-cases for government-ordered affirmative action in the 1980s. In contrast, the industrial unions, at the national level at least, supported Title VII and pioneered the design and implementation of voluntary affirmative action programs. They did so despite the fact that their majority-white memberships were likely to object, and despite the fact that they were far less likely than employers to become the targets of direct attack in public enforcement actions. Indeed, the OFCC had no power whatsoever against unions. Unions could effectively block employer compliance by blocking the provisions the OFFC wanted, and the OFCC could do nothing about it. The craft unions learned this early on, and it was a lesson the industrial unions would surely learn in time. So why did unions agree to affirmative action policies that were sure to anger their majority-white memberships? In this chapter, I will tell the story of Weber from the standpoint of the case's union defendant, the United Steelworkers of America International Union (USWA or “the union”), then the largest affiliate of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). We will see that the USWA introduced voluntary affirmative action to the steel industry, and carried it with them to aluminum (which is where Weber takes place). The USWA's policies were in part driven by the union's own aspiration (often unachieved in practice) to be on the progressive side of civil rights disputes. In large part, however, the union was driven to voluntary affirmative action as a defense against one litigation strategy it particularly feared-one that both the EEOC and the NAACP embraced early on in their Title VII efforts. That litigation strategy was the attack, against both union and employer defendants, on the continued use of seniority systems that pre-dated Title VII, were not adopted for discriminatory reasons, but had the effect of perpetuating pre-Title VII race discrimination committed by the employer in hiring and initial job assignment. Such attacks, if successful, created the strong possibility that trial courts and civil rights lawyers with no labor-management experience would take on (and botch) the job of re-designing complex seniority systems, and would impose quotas as injunctive relief. For USWA, a far better solution was for sophisticated unions and employers to do the work themselves through collective bargaining. From the perspective of the USWA, then, the story of voluntary affirmative action was largely a story about seniority-even though the Weber case itself was not. Seen from this standpoint, the story of Weber is an odd story indeed. As we shall see, two years before the Supreme Court decided in Weber to uphold the use of voluntary race-based affirmative action under Title VII, it had already, in its 1977 decision in United States v. Teamsters, overruled the adverse seniority cases that were the occasion for the USWA's use of affirmative action in its collective bargaining agreements.

Source Publication

Employment Discrimination Stories

Source Editors/Authors

Joel Wm. Friedman

Publication Date

2006

United Steelworkers of America v. Brian Weber

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS