California Racial Discrimination Attorney

Both state and federal laws strictly prohibit employment discrimination based on race, ethnicity and national origin in addition to other protected classes. Having litigated thousands of employment cases, I have the skills and experience to help individuals protect their rights against racial discrimination stemming from:

• Disparate treatment, or deliberately treating people differently because of their race. Slurs, “jokes” and other offensive behavior that creates a racially hostile work environment fall into this category.
• Disparate impact, or exclude members of a certain class or race from certain jobs or promotions. Company policies that adversely affect a particular minority group fall into this category.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISPARATE TREATMENT AND DISPARATE IMPACT

Understanding examples of racial discrimination in the workplace that qualify as examples of disaprate treatment is fairly easy. Most can discern when someone is the target of hostile behavior due to their race.

Understanding what constitutes disparate impact can be more challenging for some. The idea of discrimination in the form of disprate impact originates from the Supreme Court case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. This case involved Duke Power’s Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, which had instituted policies in the 1950s that prevented Black employees from easily transferring to higher paying departments within the company.

For example, although possessing a high school education would not positively or negatively impact an employee’s ability to perform certain tasks in the departments where jobs paid more, the company still required employees to have a high school diploma in order to work in any department besides Labor, the lowest-paying department where Black employees tended to work because many did not have high school diplomas at the time.

The Supreme Court eventually stated Title VII “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business necessity. . . . [G]ood intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.”

The Supreme Court’s decisions follows with “On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability.”

Essentially, disparate treatment is almost always intentional in nature. Disparate impact may be unintentional, but that does not mean it does constitute a form of workplace racial discrimination. If a policy has a negative impact on employees of a certain race and it does not serve a business necessity, it is an unfair and unjust policy.

Proving that a company policy qualifies as an example of racial discrimination in its disparate impact form can be particular challenging. This is not to say a victim shouldn’t take legal action if they have genuine reason to believe they have been treated unfairly or prevented from thriving in their job due to their racial identity.

Instead, it highlights the importance of coordinating with the experts at a California racial discrimination law firm when bringing a case against an employer. You need assistance from experienced professionals who understand the nuances of both Federal and California laws regarding workplace racial discrimination. We will review your case thoroughly and provide all the information you need to better understand what your legal options may be. Should you decide to hire us, our California racial discrimination attorneys will also conduct a thorough investigation and gather the evidence needed to optimize your chances of seeing justice served.