In Win for Workers, Supreme Court Opens Door to More Discrimination Claims

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court made it easier Wednesday for workers to bring claims challenging job transfers as discriminatory, ruling that allegations of illegal treatment can be valid even if an employee’s pay or rank don’t change.

The court revived a lawsuit by a female police sergeant in St. Louis, Mo., who said she was unlawfully transferred from the intelligence division to a less prestigious patrol position because she is a woman.

A federal appeals court in St. Louis dismissed the suit, concluding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires a plaintiff to show she suffered significant harm from a discriminatory act.

Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan said that while an employee must show more than trifling harm from an employer’s discriminatory action, the appeals court had raised the bar too high.

“‘Discriminate against’ means treat worse, here based on sex. But neither that phrase nor any other says anything about how much worse,” Kagan wrote. “There is nothing in the provision to distinguish, as the courts below did, between transfers causing significant disadvantages and transfers causing not-so-significant ones.”

Kagan’s decision was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Three other justices agreed with the outcome in separate opinions. One, Brett Kavanaugh, said even the majority’s test was too stringent for employees. “The discrimination is harm,” he wrote, even if the employee demonstrates no additional injury.

Justice Samuel Alito, in contrast, wrote that Kagan failed to give lower courts sufficient guidance in applying the law. “I do not join the Court’s unhelpful opinion,” he wrote.

The decision is the latest in a string of high-court rulings that have bolstered worker protections under Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

The court in 2020 said Title VII protects employees from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, a decision that for the first time extended federal workplace protections to LGBT employees nationwide.

Last year, the court unanimously ruled for a Christian former postal worker who said he was discriminated against because he refused to deliver mail on Sundays.

The plaintiff in Wednesday’s case, Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow, worked as a plainclothes sergeant with the St. Louis Police Department, managing cases about public corruption and human trafficking. The role came with several perks, she said, including challenging work and an FBI-issued vehicle.

Muldrow got a new supervisor in 2017, who transferred her and replaced her with a man. According to Muldrow’s lawsuit, her new position involved mundane administrative and patrol tasks, without the perks she enjoyed previously. She was never formally demoted.

Her lawyer, Brian Wolfman, said Wednesday’s decision reiterates that Title VII “means what it says: you can’t discriminate in the workplace.”

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s lawyer at the high court, had filed a brief supporting Muldrow’s position.

The city’s lawyers said Muldrow was reassigned, along with many other male and female officers, as part of a routine staffing reallocation. Bob Loeb, who argued for St. Louis at the high court, said the city looked forward to showing that Muldrow can’t meet the new standard.

The decision likely means more charges of discrimination will flow to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency designated with protecting people from discrimination in the workplace, said Janet Dhillon, who served as EEOC chair during the last two years of the Trump administration.

Lawyers and workers have long filed discrimination charges regarding actions such as job transfers, undesirable shift assignments and reductions in duties or titles, but the agency was limited by courts’ interpretation of what constituted potential Title VII violations.

Now, the EEOC will investigate those with a more expansive view, Dhillon said. In fiscal year 2022, the agency found no reasonable cause to believe discrimination occurred in 62% of the Title VII charges it investigated. In light of the Muldrow ruling, “I anticipate that percentage will go down,” she said.

Workers still face many hurdles getting discrimination claims before juries, said University of Illinois law professor Suja Thomas. “Unfortunately, there are lots of other ways courts are dismissing these cases,” Thomas said.

Lauren Weber contributed to this article.

Write to Jan Wolfe at [email protected] and Jess Bravin at [email protected]