Word: action
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crucial case of United Steelworkers of America vs. Weber, the U.S. Supreme Court gave an answer. Employers can indeed choose to give special job preference to blacks without fear of being harassed by reverse-discrimination suits brought by other employees. The ruling was a strong endorsement of affirmative-action programs, one that will both protect them from legal assault and spur their expansion...
...reverse-discrimination issue: it said no to explicit quotas for minorities, at least in admissions to publicly supported universities, but it also declared that, yes, race could be a factor in choosing applicants. It did not speak at all to the issue of the fairness of affirmative action in employment...
...lower courts, he lost in the high court. By a 5-to-2 vote, the justices ruled that employers can indeed give blacks special preference for jobs that were traditionally all white. Whether or not it has had discriminatory job practices in the past, a company can use affirmative-action programs to remedy "manifest racial imbalance" in employment without fear of being challenged for its efforts in the courts...
Kaiser and the Steelworkers Union agreed to set up affirmative-action training programs at 15 of the company's plants in the U.S. five years ago. At that time, blacks accounted for less than 2% of the 273 skilled craftsmen at the Kaiser plant where Weber was employed, even though blacks made up 39% of the local work force. To close that gap, the company and the union decided to accept whites and blacks into the program at that plant on a 1-to-1 basis. When the program rejected Weber, he filed suit. Federal courts upheld his claim...
Civil rights leaders cheered the decision. Said Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP: "Had we lost this case, the cause of affirmative action would have been set back ten years." The reaction in many boardrooms was relief. Before the ruling, employers were caught in a bind. If they gave minorities a break to remedy racial imbalance in hiring, they risked suits from rejected whites like Weber. But if they had a racially imbalanced work force and did nothing about it, they risked getting sued by minorities as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); they also stood...