Employment Discrimination (Essay Sample)

Employment Discrimination
Name:
Institution:
Employment Discrimination
For the majority of people, income as well as social status is dependent on their jobs, their occupations- their employment. That is what makes practices of fair employment so significant. Discrimination elimination in employment, promotion, and occupation is one of the implicit goals within the Human rights Universal Declaration and an explicit goal within the core standards of labor of which have been adopted by the international labor organization. However, employment equality is often overlooked as an economic justice, civil rights, and human rights in the United States.
Employment discrimination legislations seek to prevent discrimination based on sex, race, religion, ethnicity, age, and physical disability by employers. In addition, there is also an increasing legislation preventing employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Discriminatory practices consist of bias in hiring and promotion and further include job assignment, compensation, termination, as well as numerous kinds of harassments. The key aspect of employment discrimination legislations is composed of federal as well as state statutes. The U.S constitution as well as several other state constitutions provides extra protection whereby the government body is the employer or the government has taken vital steps to foster the practice of employer discrimination. The fifth and fourteenth U.S constitution amendments restrict the federal power and state governments to discriminate. The U.S Fifth Amendment has an explicit requirement stating that the federal government cannot deprive individuals of property, liberty, or life, without due law process. It also has an implicit guarantee that every person receives equal protection of the laws. While the fourteenth U.S amendment explicitly forbids states from violating a person’s rights of due process as well as equal protection. In context of employment, the right of equal employment restricts state power and federal government to employment discrimination practices by treating employees and job applicants unequally because of group membership, such as sex or race. The protection of due process requires that employees get a fair procedural process prior to them being terminated if the termination is in relation to liberty such as right of free speech or interest in property.
In the current business environment, it is no longer strange for employees to discriminated against the law be it directly or indirectly. The employment discrimination law is created to safeguard employees from discrimination that is based on ethnicity, race, religion, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, family status, pardoned convicts, disability, employer retaliation, enforcement, and harassment.
Generally, direct intentional discrimination on specified groups within human rights legislation is unlawful. Nevertheless, under certain situations direct intentional discrimination is acceptable.
Indirect or systemic discrimination happens when there is none intentional discrimination, but arrangements, systems or policies permits such happenings. Such employment practices tend to be neutral and impartially implemented, and yet they exclude particular people groups for reasons that are unrelated to the job (Schwind et,. al, 2005, p 177-182). With indirect discrimination, an employer can argue that some form of discrimination is needed for particular kinds of jobs. It is abit complex to term what indirect discrimination is because it is hard to fight and detect and at times is usually hidden and requires effort and effectiveness in dealing with. Indirect discrimination is not a frequent occurrence, yet in particular, situations it is needed such as in height and length, scorecards, employment test, hiring and promotion policies. These are some of few discriminatory indirect examples that are imposed on the employees from the employers.
That being said, there are several advantages and disadvantages to employment discrimination, that happen due to human resource practices such as termination, hiring, compensation, promotion, and job assignment. While gender balance is considered a good thing, it also has its negative aspect hence the direct and indirect discrimination practice. Two areas that can be considered in this regard are age discrimination and sex discrimination
Age discrimination
This is when an employer uses age as a determinant factor in a job related decision. For example, when an employer denies an applicant a job opportunity based on age and denying an employee promotion, trainings or other forms of opportunity based on age.
For an older person within the workforce, having protection against being discriminated due to age has its advantage, in that, if older person is performing within his/her respective job, it is very unlikely that they will be tossed out because of their age or salary scale. While the disadvantage of an older person who is not performing in their job will tend to feel entitled and protected, and may even be protected, which now becomes a disadvantage for their employer (eeoc, 2014, 1). The caveat for an older person is their ability to do the job as well as keep their skills up to date. In addition, numerous employers are inconsiderate to the fact that older employees are more loyal to the company and possess knowledge that is not easily duplicated. Regarding a younger person, the disadvantage is that age discrimin...