The US supreme court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in a case that has the potential to transform workplace discrimination claims and unleash a flood of lawsuits from white people, straight people and men.
Marlean Ames has brought an appeal to the highest court claiming that she was passed over for a job and demoted because she is straight. She says she was removed from her position as an administrator in a state agency for youth services in Ohio and replaced by a gay man.
Her petition to the supreme court challenges the way that such “reverse discrimination” cases have been handled in lower courts. Previous rulings have determined that people from majority groups – such as men, white and straight people – have to meet a higher legal bar than those from minority groups in proving workplace bias.
Stakes in the case are high. Should the rightwing supermajority on the supreme court side with Ames, 60, as is widely expected, the floodgates would be opened to discrimination claims from an array of majority groups.
On the other hand, programs that attempt to increase diversity, equity and inclusion among the workforce could be further battered at a time when DEI is already under sustained assault from the Trump administration.
The politically charged nature of the case was underlined when America First Legal, the group founded by Trump’s deputy chief of staff at the White House, Stephen Miller, filed an amicus brief with the supreme court supporting Ames’s claim. It argued that many leading companies “illegally awarded jobs, special benefits, bonuses, and other career opportunities to minorities while openly excluding whites (and sometimes Asians), heterosexuals, and males”.
Groups opposing the Ames suit have countered that Black people and other minority groups are much more likely to be the subject of bias at work and that reverse discrimination was rare.
Ames’s case has been brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the 1964 statute that was one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights movement.
Article by:Source: Ed Pilkington
