U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Ricci V. Destefano

1764 Words8 Pages
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, commonly referred to as Title VII, was a major milestone in American history. Essentially, this act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees in processes of hiring, promotion, and termination decisions that are based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This act relates closely with affirmative action policies which were created around the same time in order to benefit underrepresented groups of people. Since courts began to hear more and more claims of unfair treatment following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the Department of Labor met in 1978 to develop guidelines for the courts to follow (Mitchell, 2013). There, the inception of the Uniform Guidelines on Employment Selection Procedures (UGESP) was created. These procedures became a focal point during the Ricci v. DeStefano U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in 2009. In 2003, the City of New Haven, Connecticut, needed to fill vacancies in their chain of command within their fire department. They were looking to promote fireman to lieutenant or captain positions. Sensibly, they decided to hire an external company, called Industrial/Organization Solutions, Inc. (IOS), to develop and administer its examination. Since the IOS was receiving a very large amount of money to develop and administer its exams, they took extreme measures to verify the test was unbiased, job related, and consistent with business necessity. The extra measures which were taken to validate the exam were done in order to ensure that the exam did not favor White candidates (Mitchell, 2013). 118 firefighters took the exam; including 77 for lieutenant and 31 for captain (ten firefighters did not complete the exam for unknown reasons). It should be noted that
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