The Nixon administration, far from opposing these new measures, expanded the policy by further applying the doctrine of “disparate impact” (rather than “disparate treatment”).11 Seeking to embarrass organized labor, and enlarge a growing schism between the civil rights movement and white members of unions who might be persuaded to shift their votes to the Republican Party, Nixon enforced the Philadelphia Plan first drafted by Johnson’s Department of Labor in 1967, which required that minority workers in the notoriously discriminatory construction trades be hired in rough proportion to their
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