Support For Affirmative Action
Guste pleased liberals by being a strong defender of affirmative action. He submitted an amicus curiae brief in the 1986-1987 case Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County, California on behalf of a female county employee who was promoted over an equally qualified male employee. The plan provided that, in making promotions to positions within a traditionally segregated job classification in which women have been significantly underrepresented, the transportation agency was authorized to consider as one factor the sex of a qualified applicant. The agency said that women were represented in numbers far less than their proportion of the county labor force. Therefore, the county plan was intended to achieve a statistically measurable yearly improvement in the hiring, training, and promotion of minorities and women. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the county government that the voluntary affirmative-action plan did not violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, who sided with the Reagan administration, said that the Santa Clara County plan was "not established to remedy prior sex discrimination by the agency, but imposed racial and sexual tailoring that would, in defiance of normal expectations and laws of probability, give each protected racial and sexual group a governmentally determined 'proper' proportion of each job category," or, in other words, racial or sexual quotas.
Read more about this topic: William J. Guste
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