Human Resources Legal, Safety and Regulatory Requirements (Essay Sample)

Human Resources Legal, Safety and Regulatory Requirements
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Introduction
Proper development of legal, safety and regulatory requirements has not been an easy task in the recent past for most organizations across America. In the last few decades, both the American federal and state governments have been able to develop various new laws protecting individual persons against any form of discrimination in their places of work. This shows how the scope of employee rights has continued to grow over the last few centuries. The American government was eventually forced to establish the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which is an oversight body that acts as a watch dog and ensures that the rights of individual employees are well protected in the places of work and that the employee statutory rights are also adhered to by the various employers. Such employee statutory rights include protection of the employees against discrimination based on gender, color, race, religion or even disabilities (Dpenta, 2013).
Today, the American job market is filled with a diverse market of individuals. This may create a form of biasness to some individuals and to some situations and therefore instilling unwanted chaos in the work place. The HR managers are therefore faced with a tough task of creating and developing an environment that is free from any form of biasness and discrimination (Madison, 2005). Every Human Resource Department of any given organization across America is entitled to safeguard various legal laws and regulations that must be abided to as stipulated under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), American with Disability Act of 1990, the U.S. Department of Labor amongst other government law enforcing bodies so as to prevent such organizations from running into lawsuits with its employees. Legal, safety and regulatory laws are therefore crucial for any given organization in that they bring about stability in employment and expansion of company ventures (Madison, 2005).
Common sense and Compassion vs. Litigation
In the current work places, it is hard for any person to say that ‘common sense and compassion has been replaced by litigation.’ I personally disagree with the statement because of the fact that even at this time of the century, there are still individuals in places of work who cannot use their common sense or compassion when dealing with individuals who belong to a different race, color, gender, religion or even individuals who have disabilities. Today, the world may choose to view discrimination as outdated and in our past but there still a lot of traces of discrimination and discriminatory cases in our organizations and even a possibility of such events continuing in our near future. According to Green (2003), the change in times has made it hard for Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964 to fully protect employees against new forms of discrimination which have proved more complex and unconscious. Employers for example have ventured into silent forms of discriminations which clearly go unnoticed and unreported ranging from parental leave discriminations, unlawful place of work harassments to wrongful and unexpected termination of employees (Gilbert, 2010).
On the other hand, racism has proved to be amongst the most notorious societal norms to deal with in the 21st century. To some individuals racism is an inner thing and clearly unintentional. Such characters are just racists by nature and continue to remain racists but the funny thing is that they strongly believe and value equality in employment. So no matter how much they bully others on racial grounds in the place of work, they still appreciate the law and aspect of equality. But, is it right for them to do so? Is the government doing enough to prevent such cases? This proves yet another loop hole that needs to be carefully dealt with. Changes experienced in our societies in the last three decades have as well led to introduction of yet some other new forms of minority groups of the society apart from women and children; Lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals (LGBT) who more than any other minority group of the society have recently been faced with a lot of discrimination in places of work. It is evident how even with the current laws and policies already in play and providing protection to such groups of the society, the current system are incomplete and inadequate (Pizer et.al, 2012).
Roughly, about four percent of the American work force have the identity of belonging to LGBT group. This is about eight million American citizens. Over the past decades, different activists have tirelessly fought for the rights of such individuals in the places of work with minimal outcomes. Some organizations have responded by adequately developing legal, safety and regulatory policies protecting rights of such individuals whereas others have done nothing about it. The federal government has therefore been forced to enact various laws to curb new developing forms of discriminations in the places of work. Currently there is a pending bill in the congress that will wholly cover the cases of discrimination against such individual citizens; the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) developed to explicitly protect individuals against the so called gender identity discrimination (Pizer et.al, 2012).
Conclusion
Every individual group of the American society is equally important and should be able to fully enjoy the benefi...