Posted on 05/13/2011 1:01:49 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
The Chicago Fire Department must hire 111 bypassed black firefighter candidates — and distribute “tens of millions of dollars” in damages to 6,000 others who will never get that chance — a federal appeals court ruled Friday, upholding a landmark ruling.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 9-to-0 decision, that, contrary to the city’s contention, African-American candidates hadn’t waited too long before filing a lawsuit that accused the city of discriminating against them for the way it handled a 1995 firefighter’s entrance exam.
On Friday, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling and sent the case back to the trial court to implement what it called the “hiring remedy” the city has been stalling.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Joshua Karsh said the decision means Chicago must hire 111 African-American firefighters and adjust their pensions as if they had been on the job since 1995. Six-thousand others will share “tens of millions of dollars” in damages, Karsh said.
“We won last June 9-to-0, which is unusual in a civil rights case,” Karsh said. “We then had the city raise a dispute on what the Supreme Court’s opinion means. The Seventh Circuit agreed with us that hiring must now take place.
“The city gave a test back in 1995 that did not measure the abillity to be a firefighter. It made it more than six times more likely that white applicants would be hired rather than African-Americans with no job-related justification. Nothing about getting a high score on that test predicted anything about whether you’d be a superior firefighter.”
When results from the 1995 entrance exam were disappointing for minorities, the city established a cutoff score of 89 and hired randomly from the top 1,800 “well-qualified” candidates.
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
WTF????????
Simple as that.
So now we get to have fire captains who can't read.
Did anyone expect anything different from Chicago? Now they will have fire fighters that don’t know one end of a fire hose from the other.
With the help of a good attorney, one could file a claim that he wanted to be a Chicago firefighter and do some farming on his off duty days. Double dip!
Two decades later, Congress codified the requirements of the “disparate impact” claims Griggs had recognized. Pub. L. 102–166, §105, 105 Stat. 1074, 42 U. S. C. §2000e–2(k). That provision states:
“(1)(A) An unlawful employment practice based on disparate impact is established under this subchapter only if—
“(i) a complaining party demonstrates that a respondent uses a particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and the respondent fails to demonstrate that the challenged practice is job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity … .”
Thus, a plaintiff establishes a prima facie disparate-impact claim by showing that the employer “ uses a particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact” on one of the prohibited bases. Ibid. (emphasis added). See Ricci v. DeStefano , 557 U. S. ___, ___ (2009) (slip op., at 18).
Petitioners’ claim satisfies that requirement. Title VII does not define “employment practice,” but we think it clear that the term encompasses the conduct of which petitioners complain: the exclusion of passing applicants who scored below 89 (until the supply of scores 89 or above was exhausted) when selecting those who would advance. The City “use[d]” that practice in each round of selection. Although the City had adopted the eligibility list (embodying the score cutoffs) earlier and announced its intention to draw from that list, it made use of the practice of excluding those who scored 88 or below each time it filled a new class of firefighters. Petitioners alleged that this exclusion caused a disparate impact. Whether they adequately proved that is not before us. What matters is that their allegations, based on the City’s actual implementation of its policy, stated a cognizable claim.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-974.ZO.html
The problem is that Congress defined a violation if there was disparate impact in a way that prohibited what Chicago did. As the Court noted:
“(c) The City and its amici warn that this reading will result in a host of practical problems for employers and employees alike. The Court, however, must give effect to the law Congress enacted, not assess the consequences of each approach and adopt the one that produces the least mischief. Pp. 10–11.”
The Court did NOT find discrimination occurred. It found that under the law, disparate impact had occurred, and it wasn’t the Court’s role to decide if that disparate impact was caused by good policy.
To quote M. Savage, “The stench from the bench is making me clench.”
Wow, these guys who have never worked a day as firefighters are vested and close to retirement now. Wheeee! Free money!
C o r r u p t i o n
Handy Johnson stands outside of the fire house at 40th & Dearborn.
Handy Johnson. LOL! I wonder what he's going to do all day when he doesn't have to work?
Reparations(wealth redistribution) like “Ole Man River” “just keeps rollin along.”
poor poor whitey...wished they could counter-sue.
Eric “My People” Holder: Racism, Inc.
We need to cross-reference the list of 6,000 or so who will also receive damages against the list of the 50,000 “black farmers” who got money from Uncle Sap...wanna bet they’ll be more than a few double dippers?
Chicago is the White man’s Detroit. It would be allowed to fall through its ash if Blacks ran it.
Of course the fact that they were incompetent and incapable of doing the job really didn’t matter. Dey be black, so dey be gittin paid! Sheeeeit.
Well, at SCOTUS is was simply a statue of limitations case.
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