The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions is likely to encourage more lawsuits against other race-conscious policies, including in employment, says an employment law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
“A majority of the court has clearly expressed a general antipathy to explicitly race-based policies that are intended to improve equity,” said Pauline Kim, the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law. “As a result, ideologically motivated litigants will try to challenge companies’ diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”
However, she said, the implications of the decision for employment are not clear, because these challenges would be decided under Title VII, the statute that prohibits employment discrimination, not the U.S. Constitution.
“There is a broad array of tools for building a diverse and inclusive workforce that do not involve race-based hiring decisions and are clearly legal under Title VII,” Kim said.
For example, an employer could decide to expand where it advertises job openings or recruits candidates to draw a more diverse applicant pool. Making changes to its hiring procedures to level the playing field for all does not involve making individual personnel decisions based on race, and so is not discriminatory.
Kim is a nationally recognized expert on workplace laws and has written widely on issues such as job security, employee privacy, employment discrimination and judicial decision-making. Her 2022...
A woman saw her jail time extended for falsely accusing ten men of rape, significantly impacting lives A woman from Farnworth, Bolton, has faced severe consequences after being convicted of making...