Griggsv. Duke Power

A 1971 Supreme Court case that established the legal precedent for so-called disparate impact lawsuits involving instances of racial discrimination. In its [Page 387]decision, the Court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act required employers to promote and hire based on a person's ability to perform the job, not an abstract evaluation of the person's “credentials.” The ruling effectively forbids employers from using arbitrary tests—such as those for measuring IQ or literacy—to evaluate an employee or a potential employee, a practice that some companies at the time were using as a way to get around rules that forbid outright racial discrimination.

The background of the Griggs case began in the early 1970s, when African American workers at the Duke Power Company in North Carolina sued the company because of a rule that required employees transferring between different departments to have a high school diploma or pass an intelligence test. The plaintiffs in the case, the employees, argued that these requirements did not measure a person's ability to perform a particular job or category of jobs and were instead attempts to get around laws forbidding discrimination in the workplace. The workers argued that, due to the inferior segregated education available to blacks in North Carolina, a disproportionate number of African Americans were rendered ineligible for promotion, transfer, or employment.

The case was argued before the Supreme Court in December 1970, and the Court issued its ruling in March 1971. By unanimous decision, the Supreme Court held that the tests given by Duke Power were artificial and unnecessary and that the requirements for transfer had a disparate impact on blacks. Furthermore, the Court ruled that even if the motive for the requirements had nothing to do with racial discrimination, they were, nonetheless, discriminatory and therefore illegal. In its ruling, the Supreme Court held that employment tests must be “related to job performance.”