New York City Transit Authority v. Beazer

MR. JUSTICE STEVENS delivered the opinion of the Court. The New York City Transit Authority refuses to employ persons who use methadone. The District Court found that this policy violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a subsequent opinion, the court also held that the policy violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court of Appeals affirmed without reaching the statutory question. The departure by those courts from the procedure normally followed in addressing statutory and constitutional questions in the same case, as well as concern that the merits of these important questions had been decided erroneously, led us to grant certiorari. We now reverse.

About 40,000 persons receive methadone maintenance treatment in New York City, of whom about 26,000 participate in the five major public or semipublic programs, and 14,000 are involved in about 25 private programs. The sole purpose of all these programs is to treat the addiction of persons who have been using heroin for at least two years.

The evidence indicates that methadone is an effective cure for the physical aspects of heroin addiction. But the District Court also found “that many persons attempting to overcome heroin addiction have psychological or life-style problems which reach beyond what can be cured by the physical taking of doses of methadone.” The crucial indicator of successful methadone maintenance is the patient’s abstinence from the illegal or excessive use of drugs and alcohol. The District Court found that the risk of reversion to drug or alcohol abuse declines dramatically after the first few months of treatment. Indeed, “the strong majority” of patients who have been on methadone maintenance for at least a year are free from illicit drug use. But a significant number are not. On this critical point, the evidence relied upon by the District Court reveals that even among participants with more than 12 months’ tenure in methadone maintenance programs, the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse may often approach and even exceed 25%.

This litigation was brought by the four respondents as a class action on behalf of all persons who have been, or would in the future be, subject to discharge or rejection as employees of TA by reason of participation in a methadone maintenance program.

In this case, TA’s Rule 11 (b) places a meaningful restriction on all of its employees and job applicants; in that sense the rule is one of general applicability and satisfies the equal protection principle without further inquiry. The District Court, however, interpreted the rule as applicable to the limited class of persons who regularly use narcotic drugs, including methadone. As so interpreted, we are necessarily confronted with the question whether the rule reflects an impermissible bias against a special class.

Respondents have never questioned the validity of a special rule for all users of narcotics. Rather, they originally contended that persons receiving methadone should not be covered by that rule; in other words, they should not be included within a class that is otherwise unobjectionable. Their constitutional claim was that methadone users are entitled to be treated like most other employees and applicants rather than like other users of narcotics. But the District Court’s findings unequivocally establish that there are relevant differences between persons using methadone regularly and persons who use no narcotics of any kind.

Respondents no longer question the need, or at least the justification, for special rules for methadone users. Indeed, they vigorously defend the District Court’s opinion which expressly held that it would be permissible for TA to have a special rule denying methadone users any employment unless they had been undergoing treatment for at least a year, and another special rule denying even the most senior and reliable methadone users any of the more dangerous jobs in the system.

The constitutional defect in TA’s employment policies, according to the District Court, is not that TA has special rules for methadone users, but rather that some members of the class should have been exempted from some requirements of the special rules. Left intact by its holding are rules requiring special supervision of methadone users to detect evidence of drug abuse, and excluding them from high-risk employment. Accepting those rules, the District Court nonetheless concluded that employment in nonsensitive jobs could not be denied to methadone users who had progressed satisfactorily with their treatment for one year, and who, when examined individually, satisfied TA’s employment criteria.

But any special rule short of total exclusion that TA might adopt is likely to be less precise – and will assuredly be more costly – than the one that it currently enforces. If eligibility is marked at any intermediate point – whether after one year of treatment or later – the classification will inevitably discriminate between employees or applicants equally or almost equally apt to achieve full recovery. Even the District Court’s opinion did not rigidly specify one year as a constitutionally mandated measure of the period of treatment that guarantees full recovery from drug addiction. The uncertainties associated with the rehabilitation of heroin addicts precluded it from identifying any bright line marking the point at which the risk of regression ends. By contrast, the “no drugs” policy now enforced by TA is supported by the legitimate inference that as long as a treatment program (or other drug use) continues, a degree of uncertainty persists. Accordingly, an employment policy that postpones eligibility until the treatment program has been completed, rather than accepting an intermediate point on an uncertain line, is rational. It is neither unprincipled nor invidious in the sense that it implies disrespect for the excluded subclass.

At its simplest, the District Court’s conclusion was that TA’s rule is broader than necessary to exclude those methadone users who are not actually qualified to work for TA. We may assume not only that this conclusion is correct but also that it is probably unwise for a large employer like TA to rely on a general rule instead of individualized consideration of every job applicant. But these assumptions concern matters of personnel policy that do not implicate the principle safeguarded by the Equal Protection Clause. As the District Court recognized, the special classification created by TA’s rule serves the general objectives of safety and efficiency. Moreover, the exclusionary line challenged by respondents “is not one which is directed `against’ any individual or category of persons, but rather it represents a policy choice . . . made by that branch of Government vested with the power to make such choices.”

Because it does not circumscribe a class of persons characterized by some unpopular trait or affiliation, it does not create or reflect any special likelihood of bias on the part of the ruling majority. Under these circumstances, it is of no constitutional significance that the degree of rationality is not as great with respect to certain ill-defined subparts of the classification as it is with respect to the classification as a whole.

No matter how unwise it may be for TA to refuse employment to individual car cleaners, track repairmen, or busdrivers simply because they are receiving methadone treatment, the Constitution does not authorize a federal court to interfere in that policy decision. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is Reversed.

MR. JUSTICE WHITE, with whom MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL joins, dissenting.

The District Court found that the evidence conclusively established that petitioners exclude from employment all persons who are successfully on methadone maintenance – that is, those who after one year are “free of the use of heroin, other illicit drugs, and problem drinking,” – and those who have graduated from methadone programs and remain drug free for less than five years; that past or present successful methadone maintenance is not a meaningful predictor of poor performance or conduct in most job categories; that petitioners could use their normal employee-screening mechanisms to separate the successfully maintained users from the unsuccessful; and that petitioners do exactly that for other groups that common sense indicates might also be suspect employees. Petitioners did not challenge these factual conclusions in the Court of Appeals, but that court nonetheless reviewed the evidence and found that it overwhelmingly supported the District Court’s findings.

It bears repeating, then, that both the District Court and the Court of Appeals found that those who have been maintained on methadone for at least a year and who are free from the use of illicit drugs and alcohol can easily be identified through normal personnel procedures and, for a great many jobs, are as employable as and present no more risk than applicants from the general population.

Though petitioners’ argument here is primarily an attack upon the factfinding below, the Court does not directly accept that thesis. Instead, it concludes that the District Court and the Court of Appeals both misapplied the Equal Protection Clause. On the facts as found, however, one can reach the Court’s result only if that Clause imposes no real constraint at all in this situation.

The question before us is the rationality of placing successfully maintained or recently cured persons in the same category as those just attempting to escape heroin addiction or who have failed to escape it, rather than in with the general population. The asserted justification for the challenged classification is the objective of a capable and reliable work force, and thus the characteristic in question is employability. “Employability,” in this regard, does not mean that any particular applicant, much less every member of a given group of applicants, will turn out to be a model worker. Nor does it mean that no such applicant will ever become or be discovered to be a malingerer, thief, alcoholic, or even heroin addict. All employers take such risks. Employability, as the District Court used it in reference to successfully maintained methadone users, means only that the employer is no more likely to find a member of that group to be an unsatisfactory employee than he would an employee chosen from the general population.
Petitioners had every opportunity, but presented nothing to negative the employability of successfully maintained methadone users as distinguished from those who were unsuccessful. Instead, petitioners, like the Court, dwell on the methadone failures – those who quit the programs or who remain but turn to illicit drug use. The Court, for instance, makes much of the drug use of many of those in methadone programs, including those who have been in such programs for more than one year. But this has little force since those persons are not “successful,” can be and have been identified as such, and, despite the Court’s efforts to put them there, are not within the protection of the District Court’s injunction. That 20% to 30% are unsuccessful after one year in a methadone program tells us nothing about the employability of the successful group, and it is the latter category of applicants that the District Court and the Court of Appeals held to be unconstitutionally burdened by the blanket rule disqualifying them from employment.

Finally, even were the District Court wrong, and even were successfully maintained persons marginally less employable than the average applicant, the blanket exclusion of only these people, when but a few are actually unemployable and when many other groups have varying numbers of unemployable members, is arbitrary and unconstitutional. Many persons now suffer from or may again suffer from some handicap related to employability. But petitioners have singled out respondents – unlike ex-offenders, former alcoholics and mental patients, diabetics, epileptics, and those currently using tranquilizers, for example – for sacrifice to this at best ethereal and likely nonexistent risk of increased unemployability. Such an arbitrary assignment of burdens among classes that are similarly situated with respect to the proffered objectives is the type of invidious choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause.