Employment Discrimination- Legal term project - Research Paper Example

It is essential to understand the content of employment laws that prohibit discrimination because inadequately following these laws may cost a company vast resources as a result of litigation if that company is not careful to prevent discriminatory practices in its hiring and employment. Employment discrimination is discrimination in the process of hiring, promoting, assigning, terminating, or compensating employees, which includes any kind of harassment or on-the-job persecution.2 Most often, this kind of discrimination is defined in terms of an impact on members of a particular class or category of people, such as ethnicity, gender, or disability.

Measuring discrimination relative to the effect on members of protected classes is necessary because without membership in particular classes of people, there would be no basis for people to discriminate or hold prejudices against others. Clearly, discrimination can either occur on an explicit or implicit level, which corresponds to the difference between intentional and unintentional discrimination. In the case of unintentional, or implicit, discrimination, there may be subconscious biases or prejudices that a hiring manager may have against people of a certain group (e.g. that physically handicapped people are below average in intelligence) can cause a disparate impact on that group, simply through the manager’s hiring decisions.

3 This impact may extend past the hiring process and into the areas of wage discrimination and workplace retaliation for various reasons. There are Constitutional limits on employment discrimination such as the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as a number of Federal laws. Although Constitutional dictates are universal, they apply only to employment in government and not in the private workplace. Among the most important pieces of Federal legislation against employment discrimination is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin regarding terms, conditions, and privileges of employment.

This coincided with the granting of civil rights to minorities in the United States in other areas of public life not expressly dealing with employment. One year prior to the CRA, the Equal Pay Act (EPA) of 1963 banned compensation for employees that differs based solely on sex and not on any other factor relative to the job. While it does not exclude other discriminatory practices in hiring, one of the EPA’s conditions is that workers who perform equal work in jobs requiring “equal skill, effort, and responsibility and performed under similar working conditions” should be provided equal pay.

4 Although the pay differential between the sexes has not evened out completely since 1963, the law has been successful in paring much of the deficit. Employment