Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Title VII and Public Employee Promotion Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact Litigation

Abstract

What has been the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci v. Destefano on the selection and promotion practices of public employers?; Relying solely on circumstantial evidence, the Supreme Court held that the Civil Service Board of New Haven, Connecticut, had engaged in Title VII disparate treatment discrimination by refusing to certify the results of a promotion examination that led, in turn, to a disparate impact on African American firefighters. To limit the discretion of public employers to disregard such selection and promotion exam results, the Ricci majority held that a public employer must “have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate‐impact liability if it fails to the take the race‐conscious discriminatory action.” This article argues that the decision effectively prohibits public employers from rejecting the results of selection and promotion instruments, even though there is evidence that screening instruments inequitably affect protected groups. It also forces public employers to become more careful in developing selection and promotion examinations or face the possibility of costly Title VII litigation.

Resume Research Questions Through the Seven Philosophical Foundations of Communication

“…Critical scholars would be able to identify disparate impact caused by rules or policies during the employee selection process. One example of disparate impact in organizational entry could be an employer requiring all applicants to take a test during the resume submission process that disproportionately eliminates a minority group from consideration, especially if the test does not relate to core job functions (Roberts, 2010). Fern Johnson's (2000) language-centered perspective on culture offers six assumptions that can be applied to resume research.…”

The Myth of Bureaucratic Neutrality: Institutionalized Inequity in Local Government Hiring

“…Regardless of how the written testing relates to the job functions candidates will be asked to perform, the results are seen as a fair way to rank candidates for a position. As part of the civil service reforms adopted by municipalities during the Progressive Era, testing for merit, particularly the use of examinations, remains a common practice among local public organizations (French, 2009; Roberts, 2010; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983).…”

Multicultural and international issues in organizational change and development.

“…data appropriately and keeping in mind the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the person being assessed. (p. 391) This is certainly good advice, but in psychological assessment conducted for employment purposes, the issues are complicated (e.g., London & Bray, 1980;Roberts, 2010) and the answers are far from obvious. For example, to date, the strongest validity evidence for measures used in personnel selection by ODC or personnel psychologists are ability tests (e.g., Schmidt & Hunter, 2004), but such measures usually have an adverse impact (Outtz & Newman, 2010).…”