422 U.S. 405 (1975)
In August 1966, after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and receiving notice of their right to sue, a certified class of present and former Negro employees at the Albemarle Paper Co. plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, brought a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina against the plant's owner, Albemarle Paper Co., and the plant employees' labor union, Halifax Local No. 425.1
The suit sought permanent injunctive relief against any policy, practice, custom or usage at the plant that violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.2 The respondents initially assured the court that the suit involved no claim for any monetary awards on a class basis.3
In June 1970, after several years of discovery, the respondents moved to add a class demand for backpay, and the court ruled that this issue would be considered at trial.4 At the trial, held in July and August 1971, the major issues were the plant's seniority system, its program of employment testing, and the question of backpay.5
In its opinion of November 9, 1971, the District Court found that the petitioners had strictly segregated the plant's departmental lines of progression prior to January 1, 1964, reserving the higher paying and more skilled lines for whites.6 The racial identifiability of whole lines of progression persisted until 1968, when the lines were reorganized under a new collective-bargaining agreement, but this reorganization left Negro employees locked in the lower paying job classifications.7 The court ordered the petitioners to implement a system of plantwide seniority.8
The court refused to award backpay to the plaintiff class. It also refused to enjoin or limit Albemarle's testing program, concluding after a validation study that the personnel tests had been proven to be job related.9 The petitioners did not seek review, but the respondents appealed the denial of backpay and the refusal to limit the tests.10 A divided Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed, ruling that backpay should have been awarded and that use of the tests should have been enjoined.11 The Supreme Court granted certiorari because of an evident Circuit conflict as to the standards governing awards of backpay and as to the showing required to establish the job relatedness of pre-employment tests.12
Whether a district court may deny backpay to a successful Title VII plaintiff class solely because the employer acted without bad faith and the claim was asserted late in the litigation?13
The power to award backpay under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(g) is equitable and must be exercised in light of the large objectives of Title VII to eradicate discrimination throughout the economy and make persons whole for injuries suffered through past discrimination, so that backpay should be denied only for reasons which, if applied generally, would not frustrate those central statutory purposes.14
Yes. The District Court denied backpay on the stated grounds of absence of bad faith non-compliance and substantial prejudice from the late assertion of the claim nearly five years after suit was filed and contrary to an earlier representation.15 These grounds do not align with the statutory purposes.16 The mere absence of bad faith does not justify denying compensation for workers' injuries.17
The make-whole purpose of Title VII would be read out of the statute if backpay were awardable only upon a showing of bad faith.18 The facts establish that the petitioners had strictly segregated the plant's departmental lines of progression prior to January 1, 1964, reserving higher paying and more skilled lines for whites, and that the 1968 reorganization left Negro employees locked in lower paying job classifications under a job seniority system that perpetuated the effects of past discrimination, causing obvious loss of wage opportunities to members of the plaintiff class.19
The Court of Appeals correctly reversed the denial of backpay. The case is remanded to the District Court for reconsideration of the backpay issue under the proper standard of whether the denial would frustrate Title VII's central purposes.20
Related opinions on this issue
Marshall agreed that backpay should ordinarily be awarded.21 He emphasized that the bar of laches predicated on prejudice from tardy assertion of the claim should be particularly difficult to establish.22 The information needed to compute backpay is contained in personnel records and pay schedules normally maintained by an employer.23
Rarely, if ever, could an employer plausibly invoke the doctrine of laches on the usual ground that the passage of time has put beyond reach evidence or testimony necessary to his case.24 Marshall noted that the prejudice on which the District Court relied was of a different and more speculative variety.25 He agreed that the District Court should be the first to pass upon the issues as the Court has posed them.26
Rehnquist joined the opinion of the Court.27 He noted that the broad latitude reposed in district courts is consistent with the statute and supported by policy considerations favoring expeditious disposition of claims by a court sitting without a jury.28 Rehnquist observed that good faith alone is not a sufficient reason for refusing backpay given the narrower statutory defense in 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-12(b).29
He stated that the backpay remedy provided by Title VII is modeled on the remedial provisions of the NLRA.30 Rehnquist agreed that the District Court should not have denied backpay solely on the ground that Albemarle's breach of Title VII had not been in bad faith.31
Blackmun concurred in the judgment.32 He stated that an employer's good faith may be a very relevant factor for a court to consider in exercising its discretionary power to fashion an appropriate affirmative action order.33 This is particularly true where the employer was thrust onto the horns of a dilemma by state female protective statutes.34
Blackmun agreed with the decision of the Court to vacate the judgment of the Court of Appeals insofar as it appeared to require an injunction against all testing by Albemarle.35 He did not join the apparent view that absolute compliance with the EEOC Guidelines is a sine qua non of pre-employment test validation.36
Burger agreed that backpay availability is committed to the sound equitable discretion of the trial court.37 He dissented from the application of that principle here.38 Burger concluded that the District Court's findings of no bad faith and steps taken to integrate minorities related to reasons that would not frustrate the central statutory purposes.39
He stated that the court did not abuse its discretion by denying the remedy given the five-year delay in seeking backpay.40 Burger dissented from the method of reviewing the District Court's findings regarding Albemarle's testing policy.41 He concluded that the Court's entire analysis rested on a wooden application of EEOC Guidelines that interpret no section of Title VII and are not federal regulations submitted to public comment.42
Whether an employer carries its burden to show that pre-employment tests with racially discriminatory effects are job related by producing a concurrent validation study that compares test scores of incumbent employees with subjective supervisory rankings without job analysis or differential validation for minority applicants?43
An employer must meet the burden of showing that any given requirement has a manifest relationship to the employment in question by demonstrating through professionally acceptable methods that the tests are predictive of or significantly correlated with important elements of work behavior which comprise or are relevant to the job or jobs for which candidates are being evaluated, with the EEOC Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures entitled to great deference as the administrative interpretation of the Act by the enforcing agency.44
No. Albemarle failed to carry its burden because its concurrent validation study was materially defective in several respects under the Guidelines.45 The study showed significant correlations for the Beta Exam in only three of eight lines and produced an odd patchwork of results for the Wonderlic forms without any analysis of job attributes or skills needed.46 Supervisors ranked employees using an extremely vague standard open to divergent interpretations with no way to determine whether criteria actually considered were related to legitimate job-specific ability.47 The study focused on job groups near the top of lines of progression without findings on normal speed of promotion or efficacy of on-the-job training.48
The study dealt only with job-experienced white workers while the tests were given to new applicants who were younger, largely inexperienced, and in many instances nonwhite, without differential validation shown to be infeasible.49 The facts establish that Albemarle required applicants for skilled lines to attain national median scores on the Revised Beta Examination and Wonderlic Personnel Test after adopting the tests without meaningful study of their relationship to job-performance ability and that the District Court approved the study despite these defects.50
The District Court erred in concluding that Albemarle had proved the job relatedness of its testing program. The case is remanded to the District Court for proceedings consistent with the opinion, including the precise fashioning of necessary relief in the first instance.51
Related opinions on this issue
Blackmun concurred in the judgment vacating the Court of Appeals injunction against all testing.52 He did not agree with the apparent view that absolute compliance with the EEOC Guidelines is a sine qua non of pre-employment test validation.53 Blackmun feared that a too-rigid application of the EEOC Guidelines would leave the employer little choice but to engage in a subjective quota system of employment selection.54
He stated that pre-employment tests, so long as they are fairly related to the job skills or work characteristics desired, possess the potential of being an effective weapon in protecting equal employment opportunity because they have a unique capacity to measure all applicants objectively on a standardized basis.55
Burger dissented from the method of reviewing the District Court's findings regarding Albemarle's testing policy. He concluded that the Court's entire analysis rested on a wooden application of EEOC Guidelines that interpret no section of Title VII and are nowhere referred to in its legislative history.56 Burger stated that the Guidelines are not federal regulations which have been submitted to public comment and scrutiny as required by the Administrative Procedure Act.57
He concluded that the District Court's factual findings on validation should be affirmed under traditional standards of review unless clearly erroneous.58