Wards Cove Packing Co. V. Atonio Case Analysis

On November 21, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 into law. This act, which was in response to a series of controversial Supreme Court rulings, was designed to “amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to strengthen and improve Federal civil rights laws, to provide for damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination, to clarify provisions regarding disparate impact actions, and for other purposes.” (S. 1745, 102nd Cong.) Essentially, it targeted policy in employment discrimination cases and “provided the right to trial by jury on discrimination claims and introduced the possibility of emotional distress damages and limited the amount that a jury could award.” (The United States Congress) It gave more …show more content…
Of the several Supreme Court rulings involved in this particular policy change, there were a couple that were more controversial. The first case to be discussed, and arguably the most controversial, was the Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio decision in 1989. This case against Wards Cove Packing Co. was brought forward by a group of non-white employees stating that Wards Cove was guilty of discrimination in the hiring process. A summary of the case found on Oyez states that “As evidence, the group compared the high percentage of nonwhites in unskilled work with the high percentage of whites in skilled work.” (Wards Cove Packing Company, Inc. v. Atonio) Initially, this claim was rejected because “it found that Ward received unskilled workers through a hiring agency that enrolled primarily nonwhites.” (Wards Cove Packing Company, Inc. v. Atonio) This was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit , who gave Wards Cove the responsibility of proving there was no discrimination, before it made it to the Supreme Court. This was changed again by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote. In the opinion of the court, delivered by Justice Byron R. White, the court stated that “The Court of Appeals erred in ruling that a comparison of the percentage of cannery workers who are nonwhite and the percentage of non-cannery workers who are non-white makes out a prima facie disparate impact case. Rather, the proper comparison is generally between the racial composition of the at-issue jobs and the racial composition of the qualified population in the relevant labor market.” (Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642 (1989)) They go on to detail how the cannery workforce does not reflect the total pool of applicants or the “qualified labor force population.”

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Wards Cove Packing Co. V. Atonio Case Analysis

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