ome person, or to fire an employee, for any reason or no reason, just as an employee could quit for any or no reason (Sklover, 1997).
The introduction of laws permitting labor unions shifted this private relationship from the individual employee to the workers' collective representation (the union), but did not otherwise change its essentially private nature. If a union agreed to discriminatory practices against, say, blacks or women --or simply did not defend such workers with the energy it defended white workers--discrimination against them remained entirely legal.
This state of affairs changed with the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (National Archives, 1999). Title VII of this act barred racial and gender discrimination in the workplace (Jasper, 1999). The underlying premise of this change in the law was that such discrimination was so pervasive in society as to really not be a private matter. Had such discrimination been only isolated and rare, it would not have been a social issue. For example, there may be employers who discriminate against employees with red hair, but there is little of any evidence that redheads as a group have difficulty getting or keeping jobs for which they are otherwise qualified. In the case of race, however, the evidence for discrimination was so overwhelming that by 1964 Congress felt it had a social impact that was a legitimate matter of public concern.
It should be noted that there are earlier precedents for public oversight of otherwise private contractual matters. For example, it has long been a rule in commercial law that "common carriers," shippers who offered transportation service to the general public, could not refuse to transport some customers or their goods, or offer preferential rates to others, except in respects that were legitimately related to costs (e.g., bulk rates or group fares are legitimate, because in such cases actual transport costs are l...