The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on April 17 in favor of a Missouri police sergeant who argued that her employer illegally discriminated by giving her a lateral job transfer she didn’t want.
The decision, which found that lower courts had applied the wrong legal standard in the case, is expected to make it easier for employees to sue under federal civil rights law when they are transferred against their will, even if they have not been demoted or suffered a pay reduction.
Civil rights advocates have been interested in the case because, in their view, otherwise valid workplace claims often get thrown out by courts because employees have to show that their employers’ actions harmed them, and they thought a ruling for the police officer could change that.
At the same time, conservatives previously said that if the nation’s highest court were to side with the officer, there could be an increase in discrimination claims filed based on workplace DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—programs.
The frequency of such lawsuits has been increasing since the Supreme Court ruled against the use of affirmative action in university admissions in 2023 in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow of the St. Louis Police Department claimed that she was forced out of the intelligence unit, transferred to a less prestigious job she didn’t like, and denied a requested transfer because she was a woman.
This stranded her in what amounted to a dead-end job that offered the same pay as her previous position, she said.
The Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for a private employer or a state or local government “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
From 2008 to 2017, Ms. Muldrow worked as a sergeant in the St. Louis Police Department’s intelligence division on public corruption and human trafficking cases. She was also head of the gun crimes unit and oversaw the gang unit.
She had considerable experience with violent crime and was known as a “workhorse,” according to her petition filed with the Supreme Court.
In the lead-up to the transfer ordered by her supervisor, Ms. Muldrow observed that her supervisor addressed similarly ranked male officers according to their titles in front of her but refused to do so with her. He sometimes used the title “Mrs.” rather than “Sergeant,” which he used with male police officers.
The supervisor let sergeants in the intelligence division know that he didn’t believe in “blind transfers”—that is, compelling the transfer of an employee without discussing the matter first with the person involved.
But without warning, the complaint states, he transferred Ms. Muldrow to the department’s fifth district, claiming that he did so because the role she had been in for the previous 10 years was too “dangerous.”
New Position Denied
Ms. Muldrow sought a new position within the department as an administrative aide to a captain, but her request was denied.She sued in state court. The police department had the case transferred to a federal district court, which granted summary judgment to the department, finding that under a precedent from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, a discriminatory transfer that doesn’t “produce a material employment disadvantage” is “not an adverse employment action.”
The Eighth Circuit itself then ruled against Ms. Muldrow, finding that the forced transfer and refusal to transfer weren’t actionable under Title VII as “adverse employment actions.”
In the Supreme Court’s new opinion, Justice Kagan wrote that the lower courts rejected Ms. Muldrow’s claim because the transfer did not cause her a “significant” employment disadvantage.
Although other courts have used similar standards when addressing Title VII lawsuits surrounding job transfers, in the new ruling, the justices “disapprove that approach,” she wrote.
“Although an employee must show some harm from a forced transfer to prevail in a Title VII suit, she need not show that the injury satisfies a significance test,“ she wrote. ”Title VII’s text nowhere establishes that high bar.”
For such a discrimination claim to succeed, a transferee must demonstrate some kind of identifiable harm. “What the transferee does not have to show ... is that the harm incurred was ‘significant,’” she wrote.
“To demand ‘significance’ is to add words—and significant words, as it were—to the statute Congress enacted. It is to impose a new requirement on a Title VII claimant, so that the law as applied demands something more of her than the law as written.
“And that difference can make a real difference for complaining transferees. Many forced transfers leave workers worse off respecting employment terms or conditions.”
The court vacated the judgment of the Eighth Circuit and remanded the case to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh each filed a concurring opinion.
