Civil Rights, Women, and Diversity (summary) - Essay Example

She hid her sexual orientation from her coworkers, though people outside work knew that she was a lesbian. After Waits had worked for a year, one day her supervisor found out that Waits was a lesbian. She declared her plans of firing Waits without offering her a sound reason for that. Waits testified to the Congress that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation not be allowed in the workplace. She worked in Texas that offered no protection to gay and lesbian employees unlike most of the other states.

Since 1994, bills have been passed instructing the organizations to base their judgment of the employees solely on the basis of their performance. The enforcement of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would be a landmark achievement. However, this law faces extreme challenges from the religious groups and the moral conservatives that base the discrimination against homosexual employees on the religious and spiritual grounds. Advocates of the bill assert that all Americans should be treated fairly and equally and solely be judged according to their performance.

This fight constitutes the long history of struggle for the protection of employees’ civil rights. Slavery introduced the practice of discrimination in America. Civil rights were deemed more important than natural rights. Ratification of the US Constitution sanctioned slavery in five clauses. Congress passed constitutional amendments and civil rights acts after the Civil War to abolish slavery, but they were ineffective. Winning of the election by Hayes caused the racism to recede though it reasserted in the South in which the states adopted the Jim Crow laws.

Mexican Americans, Chinese, and Japanese workers and others also faced discrimination like the African Americans. Both the American Creed and the laws had failed to abolish discrimination in the 19th and early 20th century. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 narrowed the 14th Amendment’s meaning and made it irrelevant. Ruling over the Plessy v Ferguson case caused complete destruction of the 14th Amendment and the spread of Jim Crow laws followed. The Civil Rights Movement that was started in the late 1950s led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 whose Title VII prohibits any kind of discrimination in the workplace and enforces the disparate treatment theory has been structuring laws against discrimination till date.

The overtly discriminatory signs at the workplace were pushed aside with the enforcement of this law. In the Griggs v. Duke Power case, the Supreme Court declared the requirement of diploma illegal. The EEOC gave the 80 per cent rule to define the unlawful disparate impact. This broadened the range of discrimination that Title VII could strike down. The harm caused to the black employees by past rejection laid ground for affirmative action. Executive Order 11246 is the most affirmative action’s origin.

OFCCP enforced the Executive Order 11246 without establishing rigid goals of hiring for the companies. OFCCP uses statistical tools to review the compliance. The Affirmative Action challenged the American Creed. Affirmative action spurred a legal debate that paralleled three basic ethical considerations of a broader debate in the society; utilitarianism, ethical theories of justice, and the ethical theories of rights. The population of working women has increased in the US. Laws offering protection from discrimination include but are not limited to The Civil Rights