A Sears Suit

Call for clarification

Normally, companies are on the receiving end of lawsuits about discrimination against workers on the basis of sex and race. But last week Sears, Roebuck, the world's largest retailer (annual sales: more than $17 billion), upset that pattern.

In a sweeping class action filed in the Washington, B.C., Federal District Court, Sears blamed the Government for whatever employment unbalances exist in the retail industry. The suit, prepared by veteran Civil Rights Attorney Charles Morgan Jr., charges that the Justice Department, the Labor Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and seven agencies have built up an absurd number of conflicting goals for different minorities. Sears maintains that it is not company employment practices that have held back integration but the Government's failure to press vigorously for equality in housing, education and craft training.

Sears, the leader in an industry that employs more than 15% of the labor force, has long been at odds with the EEOC. Indeed, some thought the suit was designed to steal thunder from an anti-Sears suit still pending at EEOC. Sears officials deny this, but they make no secret of their frustrations with Washington. In 1973 the EEOC charged that Sears, which has about 417,000 people on its payroll, had followed discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. The company added a new dimension to its affirmative action program: Sears units were to hire one minority group member for every white hired until the payroll reflected the composition of the local area; women were to be hired for jobs that were traditionally men's, and vice versa. But in 1977, after an investigation, the EEOC decided that there was still "reasonable cause" to believe that the company was discriminating, and Sears and the commission have been wrangling ever since.

In its suit, Sears asks the courts to declare its existing affirmative action program to be in full accord with the law. Insists Ray Graham, Sears' director of equal opportunity: "We've made a tremendous effort to comply." He notes that since 1966 the company proportion of women managers has risen from 20% to 36%; of women craftworkers from 3.8% to 8.1%; of black managers from 4% to 7.2%; and of black craftworkers from 2.8% to 8.9%. But the EEOC now demands that 50% of new management positions and 33% of new craft openings be given to women and Sears officials protest that these goals are arbitrary.

Though Government attorneys consider the suit to be mainly a public relations gesture, it will strike a chord among many businessmen who maintain that the "discrimination" problem lies with the cumulative bad effects over the years of the many changes, contradictions and lack of coordination in federal employment regulations. The suit notes that some of Sears' present difficulties stem from postwar years, when Washington urged companies to hire veterans, who were then predominantly white and male. The later imperative to hire more women and minorities not only conflicted with this earlier priority but also resulted in hiring policies being reviewed by ten different agencies and departments. Now, Sears notes, the 1978 ban on mandatory retirement at 65 leaves fewer job openings for other minorities. A good many businessmen would agree with Sears Chairman Edward Telling when he says that his suit is a needed effort "to cut through conflicting regulation and to force a clarification of irreconcilables."

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