Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio
**Concept Overview: Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio**
"Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio" is a significant Supreme Court case addressing employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case emerged from the fishing industry in Alaska, where seasonal workers, predominantly Alaska natives and Filipino Americans, were employed in canneries. Plaintiffs, including Frank Atonio and others, alleged that they were unfairly denied higher-paying support staff positions compared to their white counterparts due to discriminatory hiring practices. The Court's ruling, delivered by Justice Byron White, concluded that statistical differences in employment based solely on ethnicity do not constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination unless intent is demonstrated. This decision set a precedent requiring proof of intent behind discriminatory practices, which made it more challenging for plaintiffs to prove cases of discrimination. The ruling was met with criticism for undermining previous legal protections against employment discrimination, leading Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to restore and clarify protections against disparate impact in employment decisions. This case remains a pivotal point in discussions about workplace equity and the complexities of proving discrimination within labor markets.
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Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio
Five salmon canneries, owned by Wards Cove Packing Company and Castle & Cooke, recruited seasonal labor for the peak of the fishing season at remote areas in Alaska. Unskilled cannery workers were recruited from Alaska natives in the region and through the Seattle local of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union; two-thirds of these employees were either Alaska natives or Filipino Americans, including Frank Atonio and twenty-one other plaintiffs. Higher-paid on-site noncannery support staff, including accountants, boat captains, chefs, electricians, engineers, managers, and physicians, were recruited from company offices in Oregon and Washington, largely by word of mouth; some 85 percent of these employees were white. For all employees, the companies provided race-segregated eating and sleeping facilities.
Plaintiff cannery workers, who believed that they were qualified to hold support staff positions but were never selected for these higher-paying jobs, filed suit in 1974 against the companies under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their argument was based on statistics that showed ethnic differences in the two classes of workers, cannery versus noncannery. In addition to evidence of segregated company housing, they asserted disparate treatment and adverse impact arguments regarding criteria and procedures used to screen them out. Among these criteria, they claimed that there were preferences for relatives of existing employees (nepotism), rehire preferences, English language requirements, failure to promote from within, and a general lack of objective screening and selection criteria. The procedures to which they objected were separate hiring channels and word-of-mouth recruitment rather than open postings of job opportunities.
Justice Byron White delivered the opinion of a divided Court (the vote was 5-4). According to the majority, the comparison between ethnic groups in the two types of jobs was irrelevant because they were drawn from different labor market pools. The Court then went beyond the case to assert that a statistical difference between ethnic groups does not give prima facie evidence of discrimination under Title VII unless intent to discriminate is proved. To provide that proof, plaintiffs must show that specific criteria, even vague and subjective criteria, statistically account for the difference. Moreover, an employer may defend criteria that have been proved to account for the difference if they are “reasoned.”
The decision had a deleterious impact on efforts to redress employment discrimination, as it reversed the broad language of Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971) by requiring proof of intent, by allowing the use of separate hiring channels, and by no longer insisting that employers must prove that biased hiring criteria are absolutely essential for job performance. Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codified much of the original Griggs ruling into law and sought to clarify the disparate impact theory argued in Wards Cove.
Bibliography
Bagyi, John M., and Wendy S. Becker. "Civil Rights Act of 1991." Encyclopedia of Human Resource Management, Key Topics and Issues. Ed. Robert K. Prescott. San Francisco: Wiley, 2012. Print.
Hero, Rodney E., and Robert R. Preuhs. "Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio." Black-Latino Relations in U.S. National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 91–92. Print.
Jones, Amos N., and D. Alexander Ewing. "The Ghost of Wards Cove: The Supreme Court, the Bush Administration, and the Ideology Undermining Title Vii." Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 21 (2005): 163–84. PDF file.
"Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio." Oyez Project. IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, 6 May 2015. Web. 15 May. 2015.
Witten, Jesse A. "Disparate Impact Doctrine Revisited: Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio." Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13.1 (1990): 383. Print.