Griggs v. Duke Power Was a Landmark

Griggs v. Duke Power was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision which stated that employers could not institute requirements that created de facto discrimination in the workplace that were not necessary for employment. The case involved the Duke Power hydroelectric plant in North Carolina. Before the Civil Rights Act, the company practiced open discrimination against African-Americans, only hiring them as part of its Labor department and in 1955 created a requirement that all employees have a high school diploma for initial hiring except in the Labor department.

After 1965 (when Title IIV of the Act became effective), Duke created a requirement that all transfers to other departments have a high school diploma, presumably to prevent African-Americans at the company from moving from Labor to more desirable, highly-paid positions in areas such as Maintenance, Operations, and Laboratory. Duke later modified its policy by allowing employees to transfer to other departments, only if they attained satisfactory scores on two intelligence tests designed to measure mechanical aptitude.

African-Americans argued that a high school diploma was not necessary to perform the jobs it was required for at the company and African-Americans tended to score lower than whites upon such aptitude tests, thus allowing the company to maintain discrimination in the workplace. Originally, the Court of Appeals found in favor of Duke, arguing that there was no apparent discriminatory intention behind these requirements.

However, Chief Justice Burger argued that "Congress has placed on employers the burden of showing that any given requirement must have a manifest relationship to the employment in question" (19: 4). In other words, employers cannot arbitrarily set requirements which have little to do with the actual job given that this can create a more unjust society and bar certain groups from advancement for no meaningful or justifiable reason.

Response to student While I agree that Title VII expanded opportunities for African-Americans to be employed in a wider range of occupations than they were previously when discrimination was practiced openly by employers, I would disagree that the Civil Rights Act simply barred discrimination in all instances. Duke Power was not technically practicing discrimination: it was merely setting conditions for employment. Unfortunately, because of historic injustices in America, these requirements made it more difficult for African-Americans to secure better-paid employment at the company.

African-Americans are less likely to graduate high school and the tests used to screen transfers and employment were designed largely by whites, which could partially explain the lower scores on the 'aptitude' tests. This ensured that the higher-level positions at the company were more likely to be staffed by whites, thus perpetuating a.