Prompt: Business & Society- First Writing
Assignment
You
are a manager employed by Johnson Controls, Inc. Your immediate supervisor has
requested that you prepare a three-page memorandum addressing the issues
involved in the Johnson Controls case which was decided
by the United States Supreme Court.
Please address how this important decision will affect the “fetal
protection policy” previously adopted by your company. You should address issues including the
financial and social impact of this decision on your company. Your supervisor has indicated that she does
not want you to cut and paste text or provide excessive quotations from the
Court’s opinion.
No
research is required. Your paper should
be based on the syllabus of the Court’s opinion as provided below.
Your
memorandum must be 3
pages in length, double-spaced and consistent with the format of the paper
memo, 5.1 in the Kunkel text.
Your paper will be evaluated on substance, style, readability and grammar. No papers will be accepted after the due date. All ideas and writing should be your own. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited.
INTERNATIONAL
UNION, UNITED AUTOMOBILE, AEROSPACE AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENT WORKERS OF
AMERICA, UAW, et al., Petitioners
v.
JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC., 499 U.S. 187, 111 S.Ct. 1196
v.
JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC., 499 U.S. 187, 111 S.Ct. 1196
No.
89-1215.
Argued
Oct. 10, 1990.
Decided
March 20, 1991.
Syllabus
A
primary ingredient in respondent's battery manufacturing process is lead,
occupational exposure to which entails health risks, including the risk of harm
to any fetus carried by a female employee. After eight of its employees became
pregnant while maintaining blood lead levels exceeding that noted by the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as critical for a worker
planning to have a family, respondent announced a policy barring all women,
except those whose infertility was medically documented, from jobs involving
actual or potential lead exposure exceeding the OSHA standard. Petitioners, a
group including employees affected by respondent's fetal-protection policy,
filed a class action in the District Court, claiming that the policy
constituted sex discrimination violative of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, as amended. The court granted summary judgment for respondent, and the
Court of Appeals affirmed. The latter court held that the proper standard for
evaluating the policy was the business necessity inquiry applied by other
Circuits; that respondent was entitled to summary judgment because petitioners
had failed to satisfy their burden of persuasion as to each of the elements of
the business necessity defense under Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio,
490 U.S. 642, 109 S.Ct. 2115, 104 L.Ed.2d 733; and that even if the proper
evaluative standard was bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) analysis,
respondent still was entitled to summary judgment because its fetal-protection
policy is reasonably necessary to further the industrial safety concern that is
part of the essence of respondent's business.
Held:
Title VII, as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), forbids
sex-specific fetal-protection policies. Pp. 197-211.
(a)
By excluding women with childbearing capacity from lead-exposed jobs,
respondent's policy creates a facial classification based on gender and
explicitly discriminates against women on the basis of their sex under § 703(a)
of Title VII. Moreover, in using the words "capable of bearing
children" as the criterion for exclusion, the policy explicitly classifies
on the basis of potential for pregnancy, which classification must be regarded,
under the PDA, in the same light as explicit sex discrimination. The Court of
Appeals erred in assuming that the policy was facially neutral because it had
only a discriminatory effect on women's employment opportunities, and because
its asserted purpose, protecting women's unconceived offspring, was ostensibly
benign. The policy is not neutral because it does not apply to male employees
in the same way as it applies to females, despite evidence about the
debilitating effect of lead exposure on the male reproductive system. Also, the
absence of a malevolent motive does not convert a facially discriminatory
policy into a neutral policy with a discriminatory effect. Cf. Phillips v.
Martin Marietta Corp., 400 U.S. 542, 91 S.Ct. 496, 27 L.Ed.2d 613. Because
respondent's policy involves disparate treatment through explicit facial
discrimination, the business necessity defense and its burden-shifting under Wards
Cove are inapplicable here. Rather, as indicated by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission's enforcement policy, respondent's policy may be defended only as a
BFOQ, a more stringent standard than business necessity. Pp. 197-200
(b)
The language of both the BFOQ provision set forth in § 703(e)(1) of Title
VII—which allows an employer to discriminate on the basis of sex "in those
certain instances where . . . sex . . . is a [BFOQ] reasonably necessary to the
normal operation of [the] particular business"—and the PDA provision that
amended Title VII which specifies that, unless pregnant employees differ from
others "in their ability or inability to work," they must be
"treated the same" as other employees "for all
employment-related purposes"—as well as these provisions' legislative
history and the case law, prohibit an employer from discriminating against a
woman because of her capacity to become pregnant unless her reproductive
potential prevents her from performing the duties of her job. The so-called
safety exception to the BFOQ is limited to instances in which sex or pregnancy
actually interferes with the employee's ability to perform, and the employer
must direct its concerns in this regard to those aspects of the woman's
job-related activities that fall within the "essence" of the
particular business. Dothard v. Rawlinson, 433 U.S. 321, 333, 335, 97
S.Ct. 2720, 2728-29, 2729-30, 53 L.Ed.2d 786; Western Air Lines, Inc. v.
Criswell, 472 U.S. 400, 413, 105 S.Ct. 2743, 2751, 86 L.Ed.2d 321. The
unconceived fetuses of respondent's female employees are neither customers nor
third parties whose safety is essential to the business of battery
manufacturing. Pp. 200-206.
(c)
Respondent cannot establish a BFOQ. Fertile women, as far as appears in the
record, participate in the manufacture of batteries as efficiently as anyone
else. Moreover, respondent's professed concerns about the welfare of the next
generation do not suffice to establish a BFOQ of female sterility. Title VII,
as amended by the PDA, mandates that decisions about the welfare of future
children be left to the parents who conceive, bear, support, and raise them
rather than to the employers who hire those parents or the courts. Pp. 206-207.
(d)
An employer's tort liability for potential fetal injuries and its increased
costs due to fertile women in the workplace do not require a different result.
If, under general tort principles, Title VII bans sex-specific fetal-protection
policies, the employer fully informs the woman of the risk, and the employer
has not acted negligently, the basis for holding an employer liable seems remote
at best. Moreover, the incremental cost of employing members of one sex cannot
justify a discriminatory refusal to hire members of that gender. 886 F.2d 871
(CA7 1989), reversed and remanded.
I feel like any woman who was told this risks of the job would either accept or reject it. Why did this company feel that they needed to put a policy in place to protect women? If they tell them, and a woman accepts, isn't that an assumption of risk? Therefore the company would be off the hook. I mean why create the policy in the first place?
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