Human Resources & Discrimination

When seriously considering perspective new hires, that are especially equal and mutually qualified and adequately skilled, centrally speaking, what will be addressed here is how does the Human Resources personnel or Hiring Manager equally and fairly carry out the comparative part of the process in their last phase of making the final hiring decision and the understood elimination piece that goes along with it all.

Ethical leadership in business must balance two imperatives: business results and human values and how exactly do the Human Resources personnel or Hiring Manager carry out the comparative part of the process in their final phases of making final hiring decisions and the understood elimination-of-candidates part of the process and the equality of it all.

Discrimination can be defined as "showing of partiality or prejudice in treatment; specific action or policies directed against the welfare of minority groups" (Armstrong, 2006). In the business environment of today it is actually common to discriminate against employees, directly or even indirectly. Employment discrimination law was enacted and put into place to help protect persons, as employees, from being discriminated against based on race, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability, pardoned convicts, harassment, employer, retaliation, and enforcement.

Normally, purposeful and direct discriminatory acts on the aforementioned groups, especially those specified in the legislation put forth by the human rights groups, is totally illegal. However, under particular specific circumstances intentional direct discrimination is acceptable. For example, a fashion store that caters to the female clientele is allowed to limit their hiring of persons who are participants of certain religious groups and faith's. This form of discrimination is known as bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) (Eigenhuis, & Dijk, 2007). The BFOQ discrimination is somewhat common and is hard to argue against in instances where a perspective employee still feels other forms of discrimination are being assuaged and carried out against them. To cite one final example, a blind person simply can not drive a truck, and a deaf person just can not be an operator in a phone company.

Indirect, unintentional, or systemic discrimination occurs if there isn't intention to actually discriminate, but the system, arrangements, or current policies still allows it to continue. Such employment practices may initially come of as standard or procedural and may be instituted partially but they still exclude specific groups of persons for reasons that are not job-related or required for safe or efficient business operations.

With this form of indirect discrimination, an employer will argue that there could possibly be a form of discrimination but again they (employer) will say it is required for the job. Indirect discrimination does not occur in overwhelming amounts of cited cases but in some cases, such as minimum height and length requirements, minimum scores on the preliminary screening tests, internal hiring policies, and other instances, are very typical examples of indirect discrimination that employers may make on their employees.

Additionally, in this research paper, there will be four different kinds of discriminations covered: hiring, job assignment, compensation and various types of harassment.

Race is generally defined as a person's ancestry or ethnic characteristics. Various people have different race and color, which just means that it is illegal to discriminate employees solely based on their ethnic background. In the year 2004, over 30,000 individual cases were lodged and received through and to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alone, and this is alarming of course ("United states equal," 2011).

So the issue of employment discrimination is STILL very much so present in just about every organization since the mid-nineteen thirties. Another huge area where discrimination has been around and is even still growing in large numbers is Age Discrimination. This is where employees in an organization are discriminated on based solely on their age. The aging, or elderly, are considered a unnecessary cost by the majority of societies citizenry because of their retirement benefits, social security and programs like Medicaid/Medicare. And then the younger members of society are also equally discriminated against and on because the prejudice is that they are much less experienced than they aged counterparts. You can't win for loosing I can begin to see here.

Next is a closer look at Equal Pay between the genders. Mostly women, almost across the board, have had to feel the brunt of this form of discrimination. Progress has definitely been made for the female gender, but still most women continue to work for employers that are mainly stereotyped as predominately feminine type jobs. And with that being said, studies still show women traditionally still very much so being paid much less than males in these very same aforementioned categories. Some of the reasons employer's still justify unequal pay for the female persuasion are that they are the "weaker sex", incapable of functioning well in a business or corporate setting (Guerin, & DelPo, 2006). Another cause, which has been rationalized by male employers, is that men have way more critical responsibilities to the family and therefore requires more income than women to take care of said needs. This very type of derogatory discrimination is extremely difficult to make a defense against, though many court rulings have dismantled the case that attempts to say that a man who cares for his family deserves to be compensated more than a woman who also has a family to raise and provide for.

There in fact are various laws enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, additionally states and local Fair Employment Practices divisions have many laws in place against this. Some of the earliest legal precedents on the books making discrimination illegal include women again; the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Recently the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009 also prohibits discrimination against women, as well as senior workers of age ("United states equal," 2011). Chief among these laws and legal requirements is the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) which gives protections to those who must take time away from the job to receive or give care for serious medical conditions, or for employees who have to have time off to also care for a family member with a medical condition of a serious nature, also. FMLA has been cited to help against gender discrimination against women is because women quite generally are the primary caregivers in family strife and situations where personal