JOBS: The Court Strikes a Blow for Seniority

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Dual System. Last week's decision ended a long and hard-fought case against the Teamsters and T.I.M.E.-DC, Inc., a trucking company based in Lubbock, Texas, which the Government accused of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics in deciding who would get over-the-road driving jobs. As recently as 1971, only 13 of the company's 1,828 over-the-road drivers were members of minorities. Like almost all trucking companies, T.I.M.E.-DC had two seniority systems, one for over-the-road drivers, the other for workers in more menial jobs. If a warehouse cargo loader became a driver, he had to begin building seniority all over again at his truck terminal. The Government claimed that was unjust, especially for blacks, who would have begun building seniority as drivers had they not been confined to menial jobs in the first place. In its decision, the court majority found that the dual system, for all its faults, did not "have its genesis in racial discrimination," nor did it penalize blacks or other minorities more than it did whites who started on the loading dock.

What impact will the decision have? In theory, it could lead to the reopening of big job-discrimination cases already settled by consent decree, such as those involving AT&T and big U.S. steelmakers. All have moved decisively to upgrade blacks and other minorities. But no organized group is likely to challenge those programs, and companies and unions will probably keep them intact, for public relations reasons if no others.

The Supreme Court ruling, however, is likely to discourage civil rights activists from filing, or prevent them from winning, new antibias cases asking for retroactive seniority for large groups of workers going back to the date of original hire. It also casts a shadow over new seniority systems, benefiting minorities, that have been negotiated between companies and unions; when those contracts come up for renegotiation, white unionists may argue that there is no court compulsion to keep the new systems. Some lawyers predict that another effect of the ruling will be to prompt a flood of "reverse discrimination" suits by white males claiming that they were held back so that women and blacks could catch up. The leading reverse-discrimination case, filed by a white student who was denied admission to the University of California at Davis Medical School, is headed for argument before the Supreme Court next fall or winter.