Supreme Court: Harm from Job Transfer Need Not Be Serious to Violate Title VII
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court held that when an employer discriminates by way of a transfer or reassignment, employees need not show that the harm or injury satisfies a certain threshold of significance to violate Title VII and create a viable claim. In other words, employees now must only show some harm, but do not need to show that the harm was significant.
As previously reported in our Case Law Update here, for many years, Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow was a Sergeant with the St. Louis, Missouri Police Department. In the almost ten years leading up to her involuntarily transfer in 2017, Sgt. Muldrow worked in the Police Department’s Intelligence Division on public corruption and human trafficking cases.
Just before the 2017 transfer, Sgt. Muldrow’s supervisor—who she says referred to male officers by their rank, but to her as “Mrs. Clayborn—told his direct reports that he did not believe in “blind transfers.” Then, without warning, Sgt. Muldrow’s supervisor involuntarily transferred her and the other two female officers in the Intelligence Division out of the unit. The supervisor purportedly believed the work was too “dangerous.”
Once transferred, Sgt. Muldrow’s pay remained the same. But her schedule, responsibilities, supervisor, workplace environment, and other job requirements and benefits changed entirely. Unhappy with her forced transfer, Sgt. Muldrow requested a lateral transfer to become administrative aide to Captain Angela Coonce, a more desirable role with a “high profile.” Cpt. Coonce was amenable to the transfer, but she said her superiors prohibited her from making the hire.
Sgt. Muldrow sued the Police Department in Missouri state court under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She claimed the Police Department’s decision forcing her transfer was a product of sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.
The Supreme Court held that the language of Title VII, specifically the provision of § 2000e-2(a)(1) stating that Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer to “discriminate against any individual with respect to [their] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s” sex, requires an employee to show that a transfer brought about some “disadvantageous” change in an employment term or condition. That is because, as the Supreme Court held, a “transfer” implicates “terms” and “conditions” of employment, such as what position you hold and the duties you perform. And the words “discriminate against” have previously been defined by the Court in Bostock v. Clayton County to refer to “differences in treatment that injure” employees. Hence, an employee can make a viable claim of Title VII discrimination by claiming that they were treated differently when they were transferred or reassigned because of their membership in a protected class, so long as they were disadvantaged in some way.
As the Court put it, “’[d]iscriminate against’ means treat worse, here based on sex.” And no provision of Title VII, according to the Court, “establishes an elevated threshold of harm.” Indeed, the Court held that were the courts to demand significant, rather than any degree, of harm, the courts would be “add[ing] words to the statute Congress enacted,” and “demand[ing] something more than the law as written.” The Court refused to “’add words to the law’ to achieve what some employers might think “a desirable result.’”
And for practical reasons, the Court held, the lower standard can make “a real difference” for complainants, many of whom have previously been disadvantaged in ways that are more subtle, but still damaging to their careers.
The Court made clear, though, that this finding did not extend to retaliation cases, where they maintained the Court’s precedent that actions taken against an employee must be “materially adverse,” meaning that it causes “significant” harm. According to the court, that test was adopted for reasons specific to the context, as the anti-retaliation provisions are meant to capture “those employer actions serious enough to ‘dissuade[] a reasonable worker from making or supporting a charge of discrimination.’”
Read the full case: Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, Missouri.
For over forty years, Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C. has provided superior representation on a wide range of federal employment law issues, from representing federal employees nationwide in administrative investigations, disciplinary and performance actions, and Bivens lawsuits, to handling security clearance adjudications and employment discrimination cases.
