Court Expands Civil Rights Protection for State Workers

The state’s 130,000 civil servants are covered by the same civil rights laws that protect other workers against job discrimination, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The court, on a 5-2 vote, said state workers and job-seekers can bring employment discrimination complaints to the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, the same agency that investigates discrimination cases in the private sector. The state Personnel Board, which has less stringent discrimination standards, had claimed jurisdiction over state employees.

“It is inconceivable that the Legislature could have silently excluded 130,000 civil servants from its contemplation when it provided that state employees would be covered by the (Fair Employment and Housing) Act,” Justice Allen Broussard wrote for the majority.

The ruling is important for disabled people because the commission has tough rules barring discrimination against people with physical disabilities, said one lawyer involved in the case.

“These people haven’t had an independent agency to go to,” said Chris Redburn of the Employment Law Center in San Francisco. “These people now have some protection against discrimination based on physical handicaps.”

The dispute began when the California Highway Patrol rejected applications from four people--two because of back ailments, one because he was colorblind and another because the applicant had had intestinal surgery to solve a weight problem.

Board Claimed Jurisdiction

The applicants appealed to the state Personnel Board but lost. At the same time, they complained to the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, which charged that the CHP and Personnel Board were guilty of discrimination based on physical handicaps.

The finding prompted the Personnel Board to claim that it had exclusive jurisdiction over state workers and that the commission had no authority to issue findings against it. Before the dispute, the board had allowed the commission to investigate state workers’ complaints.

“Without unduly editorializing,” Justice Stanley Mosk wrote in a dissent, “it appears to me unseemly for two state agencies to engage in protracted litigation through the entire judicial system over protection or extension of their turf.

“Certainly each has enough legitimate problems with which to be concerned without entering into an arm-wrestling contest with another agency over jurisdiction.”

Justice Malcolm Lucas, also dissenting, noted that workers can now complain to both agencies, which gives them “an undeserved second bite at the administrative apple.”

The majority pointed out that from the perspective of a discrimination victim, the difference between the two agencies is “manifold.” Friend-of-the-court briefs from government workers’ groups urged the court to rule that the commission has authority over state employees.

Characterizing those briefs, Broussard said workers expressed “frustration and dissatisfaction” with the Personnel Board’s handling of discrimination complaints. (State Personnel Board v. Fair Employment and Housing, S.F. 24716; McPhail v. Court of Appeal, S.F. 24680)

In another ruling, the court, in a unanimous decision authored by Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, said:

Longtime prison inmates are not entitled to yearly parole hearings. The court said a 1982 state law that hearings should be every two years applied retroactively to inmates who previously had hearings every year. The court pointed out that many inmates affected, among them mass-killer Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, had only slim chances of ever winning parole. The ruling came in a case brought by a one-time Death Row inmate, Lawrence Jackson, whose sentence was reduced to life in prison in 1973. Jackson died in prison earlier this month. (In re Lawrence Jackson, Crim. 24381)