50 Cases Listed in Dispute With Labor Secretary : Quota Impositions Cited by Justice Dept.

The Justice Department’s civil rights chief Friday listed more than 50 cases in which he contends companies were forced to meet rigid and discriminatory employment quotas to achieve affirmative action goals.

Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds said that the examples support Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III’s contention in January that there is “a litany” of cases in which employment “goals and timetables were actually used as subterfuges for quotas.”

Reynolds released the documents as a months-old conflict between Meese and Labor Secretary William E. Brock III continued with no sign of resolution. The two Cabinet secretaries are at odds over Meese’s drive to change a 1965 executive order requiring goals and timetables in federal contracts.

Compliance Voluntary

The executive order stresses voluntary compliance and good-faith efforts at achieving hiring goals for minority members and women. However, Meese contends that quotas have been imposed when contractors failed to meet the goals.

Discussions on the issue between the two departments have ended, leaving it to President Reagan to make a decision, Reynolds said.

Reynolds’ disclosures were criticized by Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who belittled the examples as “a shameful presentation on the merits.”

Neas, noting that the two-decade-old executive order covers 23 million workers at 15,000 companies, said that it “would be absurd to argue that there haven’t been some abuses. They (Justice Department officials) have been looking for eight months and have found only 55 incidents.”

However, Reynolds said he did not believe that the examples, drawn from Labor Department employment agreements from 1980 to 1986, “are atypical.”

The examples, nearly all of which appeared to come from the construction industry, were volunteered to the Justice Department by individuals, business organizations and companies involved in the cases, Reynolds said. In most instances, the identities of the parties were not disclosed.

Kansas Case Cited

One example in which a firm was identified involved the United Bridge Co. Inc., of Lenexa, Kan., which was cited on Aug. 12, 1985, by the Labor Department’s office of federal contract compliance programs for failing “to exert adequate good-faith efforts” to achieve minimum minority employment goals.

Those goals included a 12.7% rate of minority-member truck drivers and a minimum 6.9% rate of female carpenters, heavy equipment operators, ironworkers, truck drivers and laborers.

Reynolds charged that the Labor Department unit required United Bridge to “recruit and hire qualified minorities and females until such time as the required . . . goals have been met.”

“The remedy requires hiring qualified minorities and females to meet the ‘goal,’ even if better qualified other persons are available,” Reynolds said in his analysis. “This is, of course, a quota. The use of the term ‘good-faith effort’ cannot mask what is actually being required here.”

The executive order permits the setting of specific hiring percentages as goals but not as enforceable quotas.

Labor Department officials refused to comment on Reynolds’ statements Friday but have contended in the past that requiring a company to make a “good-faith effort” to meet a minority employment goal falls far short of confronting the company with sanctions for failing to meet a minority quota.

Although Brock has made improvements in the way contracting requirements are enforced, Reynolds said, there are limitations because the program is “operating against a backdrop of regulations” that Reynolds contends have to be changed before objectionable features can be eliminated.