Opinion analysis: Fashioning a remedy for pregnancy bias

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Posted Wed, March 25th, 2015 5:28 pm by Lyle Denniston

Analysis

Dissatisfied with every argument made to it, a Supreme Court majority on Wednesday on its own fashioned a new way to test complaints that employers are discriminating against workers who become pregnant.  The result, in Young v. United Parcel Service, was a kind of hybrid remedy, judging intentional bias on the one hand and harmful impact on women workers on the other.

It was clear, though, that female workers did not receive legal protection as strong as their advocates sought, but neither did employers get a free pass from claims of pregnancy bias.  The six-to-three decision thus looked like a compromise, landing somewhere in the middle.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, added to Title VII, the basic civil rights law against workplace bias, was passed by Congress nearly four decades ago to overcome a Supreme Court ruling that allowed employers to treat female workers less favorably just because they became pregnant.

The law has two sections: one says that pregnancy bias is a form of discrimination based on sex, and the second says that female workers who become pregnant must be treated the same as other workers who can handle the same kind of job.  Wednesday’s decision was the Court’s attempt to clarify the second sentence, and the result was to give it a separate meaning.

Before announcing what its own view of that section is, the Court rejected, one by one, the alternative readings proposed to it in the case.  It turned down the plea of the female UPS driver, Peggy Young, who, with the support of the federal government, argued that female workers should get the same accommodation when they cannot perform their normal jobs as any other worker gets for any other condition that similarly impairs their ability to work.

Calling that a “most-favored-nation” approach of nearly total equality, the Court majority said it had real doubts that Congress intended such a broad grant of equality.   And, it added, such an approach would relieve the protesting worker of any duty to prove that the bias against her was intentional — that is, that she was discriminated against on purpose, because of pregnancy.   In rejecting that approach, the Court refused to follow the guidelines recently written by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

More
http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/03/opinion-analysis-fashioning-a-remedy-for-pregnancy-bias/

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