Ethics and Assessment Ricci v DeStefano

DeStefano (2009) is a legal case touching united states labor law which was determined in the United States Supreme Court that the fire department of New Haven unlawfully discriminated against ramification of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The court’s decision was that the Fire Department had unfairly kept the plaintiffs from having job promotions based on their race. The case arose after the Fire Department in 2003 offered promotional vacancies to fire department through examinations. Those who took the lieutenant examinations where seventy-seven firefighters of the New Haven station, while forty-one firefighters took for the captain openings ("Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U. The fire department feared a lawsuit on racial discrimination and flouting of affirmative action, they shelved the results and agreed that no person will be promoted based on the written examinations.

A lawsuit against racial discrimination was then brought against the Fire Department of New Haven by one Latino and 18 whites who felt that their test results had qualified them to be promoted (Mitchell, 2013). Frank Ricci was the white firefighter the center of the lawsuit who testified that he had put many hours into studying for the examinations. also, to overcome his dyslexia, he had paid someone to have textbooks recorded on tape for him to do well for the test. The respondent of the lawsuit was John DeStefano, the mayor of New Haven. DeStefano, 557 U. S. However, decisions made the employers be neutrally liable for the practices on the disparate impact of the selection of employees based on race. The decision of the court found biases as of the second circuit court in that it reversed its decision on the premise that the city had rejected results only because of having white candidates scoring high in the examination.

The court determined that the fear of litigation from the minority race could not justify the unlawful practices to the detriment of those who had succeeded (Mitchell, 2013). The most affected by these results are public employers who rely on such examinations or civil service examinations for hiring or promotions. However, the principle which was highlighted by the court is applicable to all employers and all varieties of processes which can be used to rank current or potential employees (Biddle & Biddle, 2013). The Act had intended to give equal opportunities to all, and therefore efforts which are based on personal initiatives could not warrant a state of contradiction by the employers. In this case, the credibility of the examinations must be used as the standards for hiring and promotion of employees.

However, employers can invoke the Title VII during the setting of the tests and not after they have been done affirmative action and the racial impact during the test designing. In the aspect of the Ricci v. DeStefano case, the creation of lower IQ test for African Americans could not mean that all African Americans could have lower achievement abilities compared to the whites (Miao, 2010). Therefore, the supreme court ruled that the generalized creation of bias by the lower in that the examination was hard for the African Americans could not be allowed as evidence. In their ruling, they found out little evidence from the test scores which could warrant dismissal of the results for fear of disparate impact litigation. In conclusion, the case created a precedent which would be used by employers to have standards and ranks from their employees and job applicants.