Legal, Safety, and Regulatory Requirements Paper - Essay Example

Legal, Safety, and Regulatory Requirements Paper Legal, Safety, and Regulatory Requirements Paper One of the most important components of human resource processes in the workplace is legal and regulatory requirements. These legal, regulatory requirements usually govern crucial issues such as security of employment, and as well as the securing of beneficial working relationships between the employers and the employees. Of course, beneficial working relationships between employers and their employees may commonly mean “good wages for a hard day’s work.

” From such statement, it can be seen that the mutually beneficial relationship between the employers and their employees in the workplace may signify notions of compassion and common sense. However, some industrial scholars also have the idea that litigation has already replaced common sense and compassion in the workplace, given the fact that there are very stringent legal, regulatory requirements in the workplace, and that disagreements in the workplace are already commonly settled through litigation.

In this case, this paper aims to answer the following question: have common sense and compassion in the workplace already been replaced by litigation? In order to answer this question, the researcher would primarily rely upon three main sources: the United States Department of Labor (United States Department of Labor, n. d.), the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (U. S. EEOC, n. d.), and the American with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA.gov, n. d.). One of the main agencies of the United States government that oversees working place relations in the country is the United States Department of Labor (United States Department of Labor, n. d.).

The Department of Labor’s mission actually indicated that it aims to “…foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits…” (United States Department of Labor, n. d.). In this case, in order to achieve its mission of developing the welfare of the people involved in the workplace, the Department of Labor actually involves itself in enforcing labor laws in the country, which includes the following: the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act, Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), among others (United States Department of Labor, n. d.).

Through the Department of Labor, the government is able to monitor how these labor laws are implemented, and prescribes punishment to violators. At first glance, it can be inferred that fair wages, medical benefits, and retirement security of the workers must come out from compassion and common sense in the workplace; however the fact is that companies usually tends to seek cost-effective measures to ensure profitability even to the point that it violates notions of common sense and compassion in the workplace, resulting to starvation wages and lack of benefits for the workers (United States Department of Labor, n. d.).

This explains the need for such laws, a proof that litigation has already taken over the workplace. Also, the mandate of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that it is “responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex…” (U. S. EEOC, n. d.); while the mandate of the American with Disabilities Act of 1990 which states that “historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities” and that “discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment…” (ADA.gov, n. d.). Based from these issues, it can be seen that a lot of employers have been practicing discrimination, reiterating the need of laws and confirming the fact that litigation has already replaced common sense and compassion in the workplace.

Reference List: ADA.gov (n. d.). American with Disabilities Act of 1990. Retrieved from http://www.ada.gov/archive/adastat91.htm#Anchor-Sec-49575 United States Department of Labor (n. d.). Summary of the Major Laws of the Department of Labor. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/ U. S. EEOC (n. d.). The Commission. Retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/index.cfm