Human resource-discrimination in workplace - Essay Example

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of discrimination in the modern working environments, to analyse the role of anti-discriminative legal obligations on employers, and to determine the ways of what a good employer can do in order to prevent and manage discrimination at work. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 1 provides a brief definition of discrimination and major types of discrimination; Section 2 discusses and illustrates why discrimination is still an issue in workplace; Section 3 provides a brief overview of the obligations imposed by law on employers; Section 4 discusses of how employers can manage prevent and control discrimination practice at work; Section 5 is concluding part of the essay.

Inequality is defined as unequal allocation of benefits and opportunities (Cohn, 1998). Unequal treatment can occur in various life situations, however, it is the most obvious when economic resources such as jobs, income, and wages are distributed unequally (Cohn, 1998). Unequal hiring process and employment conditions can be viewed as discrimination at workplace and in employment. More specifically, Cohn (1998:3) defines discrimination as “the provision of unequal benefits to people of different ascriptive statuses despite identical qualifications and merit”.

Some of the most common grounds for discriminative behaviour at work is recognised to be race and sex. However, discriminatory practices are based not only on the grounds of race and sex, but also on the grounds of pay equality, disability, nationality, religion, etc. (Wright and Conley, 2011). Discrimination can have two forms: direct and indirect. Direct discrimination implies an unequal treatment of an individual on the ground of his/her diversity less favourably than others. Thus, for example, it would be discriminatory to select a male engineer for work in