Re: **Spit’s **post: Those businesses are free to discriminate based on race or sex if they have fewer than 15 employees or they meet whatever rare exception that says they don’t engage in interstate commerce and no state or local law applies. Those laws are symmetrical in terms of protecting majority and minority groups.
As just one semi-famous example: men have sued Hooters for not hiring them as servers. In this case the men did not win the lawsuit, but the law clearly allowed them to bring the suit. The firefighters case in New Haven, CT is a well-known case of whites suing for racial discrimination.
A larger business probably could be all-gay or all-straight. There is no federal law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation either way. There are some state and local laws which could prevent an all-straight or all-gay business.
There are businesses that are considered minority owned. Could this be what you’re referring to? But, they cannot discriminate on the basis mentioned in the fair employment act, or by state law. In fact, there is a problem of businesses nominally minority owned in order to be able to bid on government contracts as minority firms – even though these firms aren’t actually controlled by the minority owner.
Nonprofit businesses do have more leeway. And, you can discriminate if it is truly part of the hiring criteria. For example, if I am doing a film about the life of Strom Thurmond, I can probably discriminate by race and sex for the staring role. In this case, I could say only old white men need apply. (Although I am sure that there will be plenty of roles available for young, nubile, black females.)
No, they really don’t. Faith-based get some leeway to hire on the basis of religion, but just because a secular food bank, for example, is a non-profit doesn’t mean it gets leeway to discriminate based on race or sex. The category of “private employer” includes for-profit and non-profit.
The laws about employment are different from laws about membership.
I’d hasten to add that nor do religious religious corporations, associations, educational institutions, or societies (which are the terms used in Title VII — let’s agree to use “religious organizations,” which has a hook to the law at issue, rather than muddying the waters by borrowing another term from a separate executive branch initiative).
The § 702 exemption only authorizes religious organizations to implement a religious preference in hiring. They are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of sex and race in hiring unless there is a genuine religious tenet involved. Thus, a gym operated at a Orthodox Jewish community center could discriminate on the basis of sex with respect to hiring a personal trainer for women, given Orthodox Judaism’s modesty and mixed-sex contact restrictions. However, such an organization would have a much harder time insisting that their comptroller, say, must be of a given sex or race, given that Orthodox Judaism has no doctrine or practice (so far as I know) that would require such a preference. They could however insist on an Orthodox comptroller, merely by being a religious organization even though it is a financial, rather than religious, role.
I had a friend who operated a small (3-person) electrical contracting business, which was on paper owned by his wife. Thus female owned, which made it a minority-owned business in contracting, and gave them a chance to bid on some government contracts. In his case, she actually did a lot of work for the company – all the billing & bookwork, dealing with customers, and even offering bids on some jobs.
He said that putting the business in the wife’s name to be minority-owned was a trend – for a while. It mostly died out because of another trend – the roughly 50% divorce rate!