Comment by qcnguy

Comment by qcnguy 3 days ago

They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments.

When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for <job X>, that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.

PaulDavisThe1st 3 days ago

> When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence.

That's your interpretation. The court regarded the test used the power company as unrelated to the demands of the job. You're welcome to disagree with the court about that (as the company probably did), but don't misrepresent their actual position.

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btilly 3 days ago

The court regarded the test as unrelated to the demands of the job, despite a large body of research showing that the test is generally predictive of performance on a wide class of jobs, which that job is in.
The bar was set to, "You must have good statistical evidence that this test is applicable to this job." That is an extremely high bar, that very few private companies are ever going to be able to collect sufficient data to establish.
In fact the only organization that I'm aware of which can pass that bar is the US military. Which is why they are allowed to use ability tests in hiring and initial promotions that no private company would be allowed to use.

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qcnguy 3 days ago

I didn't claim otherwise. It should however be self evident that courts have no solid basis on which to make such a call. Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter.
This is why human rights laws are always terrible in practice. They require the courts to make decisions well outside the bounds of their expertise.

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- PaulDavisThe1st 3 days ago
  
  > Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter.
  This is why both parties hire the best lawyers they can, and the best expert witnesses, to make the case for their side. We cannot require that every decision in the world be made by experts in the decision domain - sometimes they have to be made by people we've entrusted to make decisions (and in particular, decisions intended to be guided by the law).
  
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