Court Issues Pension Ruling

The court based its decision on In Teamsters vs. United States, in which the court held that a pre-Title VII seniority system that disproportionately helped white employees was an example of a bona fide seniority system.

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined the majority opinion. Justice John Paul Stevens issued a concurring opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a dissenting opinion, which Justice Stephen Breyer joined.

In her dissent, Ginsburg cited General Electric Company vs. Gilbert, a 1976 decision which held that a classification harmful to women based on pregnancy did not qualify as the kind of discrimination “because of. . . sex” prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court held in Gilbert that exclusion of pregnancy from an employer’s disability benefits “is not a gender-based discrimination at all.”

Ginsburg says Congress “moved swiftly to overturn Gilbert and make plain the legislators’ clear understanding that discrimination based on pregnancy is discrimination against women.”

“The PDA does not require redress for past discrimination,” she says. “But the 1978 law does protect women, from and after April 1979, when the Act became fully effective, against repetition or continuation of pregnancy-based disadvantageous treatment.”

The majority “gave short shrift” to AT&T employees’ argument that each check paid was a fresh act of discrimination, according to Sherril Colombo, a partner in the Miami office of Cozen O’Connor.

The Supreme Court majority may have ruled the way it did on the Hulteen case because ruling the other way “would have had a trickle-down effect,” Colombo says. “[It] would have affected employer practices liability insurance, and potentially could have opened up other laws for reinterpretation.”