CHARLOTTE – Under the N.C. Constitution, the General Assembly may not enact special economic restrictions for parts of the state without a showing of special need. Based on this doctrine, the N.C. Supreme Court has upheld a lower-court ruling that employment discrimination regulations adopted by the Orange County Human Relations Commission are unconstitutional.
In 1987, the Orange County Board of Commissioners established the human rights commission. By the mid-1990s, the county asked for, and the General Assembly passed, legislation allowing for “local administration of federal and [s]tate laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, familial status, and veteran status.”
The human rights commission, in turn, adopted anti-discrimination guidelines that included procedures and protected classes that existed only in Orange County and nowhere else in the state.
The Supreme Court agreed with Superior Court Judge Steven A. Balog that these regulations violate Article II, Section 24(1)(j) of the N.C. Constitution, which prohibits “any local, private, or special act or resolution… [r]egulating labor, trade, mining, or manufacturing.” By creating protections based upon family and veteran status and creating an addition remedy, the court found that the human rights commission had, based upon a grant of power from the legislature, in fact acted to regulate labor. The high court also noted that the record did not contain any special justification for these unique regulations.
“If the General Assembly should undertake to address employment discrimination by means of a state statute, Article II, Section 24 requires that it enact either a statewide law applicable to employers and their employees regardless of where they reside within the state or a general law that makes reasonable classifications based upon rational differences of circumstances,” Justice Robert Edmunds wrote for the high court.
“That process was not followed here. Upholding the particularized laws in this case could lead to a balkanization of the state’s employment discrimination laws, creating a patchwork of standards varying from county to county. The end result would be the ‘conglomeration of innumerable discordant communities’ that Article II, Section 24 was enacted to avoid.”
The case is Williams v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of N.C., No. 277PA01.