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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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101689
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10168900.010
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1990-09-19
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LAW, Page 61Bias or Safety?A federal court okays a tough health rule for women workers
The legal battle against sex discrimination has often pitted
the backers of women's rights against paternalistic rules that
protect -- and bar -- women from the workplace. The fight appears
to have taken a new turn as a result of a major federal decision
from the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 1982 Johnson Controls of Milwaukee instituted a strict
employment policy for women working in its battery-manufacturing
division. It excluded women capable of bearing children from jobs
that expose workers to certain levels of lead. The reason, said the
company, was medical: scientific evidence indicates that exposing
a mother to lead contamination can cause serious damage to the
nervous system of a fetus.
Several employees and their union challenged the blanket ban,
charging a violation of federal discrimination laws. But the
Seventh Circuit, siding with the company, two weeks ago concluded
that the workers had failed to show that the health hazard could
be eliminated by anything less than the sweeping measure in
question. Said the court: "The unborn child has no opportunity to
avoid this grave danger, but bears the definite risk of suffering
permanent consequences."
Calling it "the most important sex discrimination case" since
1964, dissenting Judge Frank Easterbrook, a conservative Reagan
appointee, assailed the ruling. Citing research indicating that
contaminated men also risk injuring their offspring, he wrote, "No
legal or ethical principle . . . allows Johnson to assume that
women are less able than men to make intelligent decisions about
the welfare of the next generation, that the interests of the next
generation always trump the interests of living woman, and that the
only acceptable level of risk is zero."
Labor unions, women's groups and civil libertarians denounced
the decision, which gives a boost to the fetal-protection policies
that are spreading throughout the chemical, rubber, semiconductor
and automotive industries. Challenges to such employment practices
keep arising, though, and before long one may wind up in the U.S.
Supreme Court.