¶ … Metal Workers Employment Law Case Review
One of the primary functions of the judiciary is to clearly define the parameters of legislative intent, as the passage of any law necessarily creates parties with a vested interest in bypassing or overturning the statute, and in the case of Local 28, Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC 478 U.S. 421 (1986) the Supreme Court was again tasked with assessing the validity of a law via its method of application. This case of Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC presented the high court with an opportunity to decisively delineate the remedies afforded to correct violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. When the New York State Commission for Human Rights identified New York City's Local 28 Joint Apprenticeship Committee (JAC) as a gross violator of Title VII in its hiring practices, filing suit to obtain injunctive relief, the Second Circuit Court ruled in their favor, ordering the JAC to cease and desist racially discriminatory practices (1976). The Second Circuit Court determined that the "Sheet Metal Workers ... had formally excluded Negroes until 1946, and for the next twenty years no Negro became a member of the Local 28 in New York City" (Moreno, 1999) with unofficial exclusion being maintained through an apprenticeship system defined by nepotism and bigotry.
Despite the Second Circuit's decision, however, countless sessions of litigation followed during the following 18 years, as the Local 28 and its JAC obstinately...
When the Supreme Court finally heard the case in 1986, the JAC's appeal of the remedies ordered by the Second Circuit targeted section 706(g) of Title VII, which "invests broad equitable discretion in the federal courts to effectuate the 'make whole' objective of title VII (and) aims to make the victims of unlawful discrimination whole by restoring them so far as possible ... To a position where they would have been were it not for the unlawful discrimination" (Napolitano, 1987). According to the JAC's interpretation of the statutory language, "section 706(g) authorizes a district court to award preferential treatment only to actual victims of unlawful discrimination" (Brennan, 1986), despite the fact that the court had previously ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that the ostensible legal intention of Title VII was "to remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees" (1971). In deciding "whether the remedial provisions of Title VII ... empower a district court to order race-conscious relief that may benefit individuals who are not identified victims of unlawful discrimination" (Napolitano, 1987), the court's contentious 5-4 decision ultimately affirmed the Second Circuit's original imposition of a 29% nonwhite membership quota, and the $150,000 fine intended to provide funding for increased quality efforts within the Local 28's JAC program.
The decision rendered in the case of Sheet Metal Workers v.…
