Employment Discrimination in 2014

“Employment Discrimination in 2014”

Employment discrimination law in the United States derives from the common law, and a collection of state and federal laws, particularly the Civil Rights Act 1964, as well as by ordinances of counties and municipalities. Discriminating against another because of a specific characteristic is illegal. You would think that in this day and time discrimination was a thing of the past. You would actually be surprised to know that it exists now just as much as before. There are now new forms of discrimination that were never considered to be discriminatory in the past. Even though employees are protected in the workplace by a number of federal and state laws, the laws provide a very minimal level of protection to the employees. There are several things that you need to know as an employee regarding your rights in a discriminatory manner.
When may I be legally fired? In the 18th and 19th centuries, employees had no rights or protection in the workplace. An employee could be fired for any reason at-will. Being sick or injured simply was not a reason to be excused from work. Until 1959 the concept of at-will employment was applied. The one exception to the at-will rule is that an employer may not fire an employee for an illegal reason. A violation of a state constitution, public policy, federal law, or a state statute would be considered illegal. Recruiting, hiring, job evaluations, promotion policies, training, compensation and disciplinary action are all examples of protected areas when discussing discrimination. Race, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, disability, and age are also protected under Federal law.

The Civil Rights Act was one of the most powerful acts passed, because it protects employees against discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and sex. Harassment is also prohibited based on those protected categories.The first proposal of the Civil Rights Actwas made by President John F. Kennedy. After surviving a strong opposition from southern members of Congress and was then signed into law by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.The Civil Rights act was also responsible for ending unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. As a black woman I am not sure where I would be in life if this law was not applied. Many people of my race did not have the same rights that I do now in this day and age. Many people had to fight for the freedoms that many of us take for granted.
Americans who are disabled already have a disadvantage in comparison to many others. I feel as though there are only certain corporations out there who consistently readily hire disabled employees. I do only see though just a few. I know that employers are not supposed to discriminate but other than many grocery chains such as Kroger, Randall’s, and Wal-Mart,I rarely see many disabled employees working in these facilities.
A protection made available to employees with disabilities is the Americans with Disabilities Act. This act prohibits employers from discriminating or limiting/classifying a job applicant or employee in an adverse way, denying employment opportunities to people who truly qualify, or not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of disabled employees, not advancing employees with disabilities in the business, and/or not providing needed accommodations in training materials or policies, and the provision of qualified readers or interpreters.
Because of the large number of American women taking jobs in the war industries during World War II, employers were urged by the National War Labor Board in 1942 to voluntarily make "adjustments which equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations."
Not only did employers fail to heed this "voluntary" request, but at the war 's end most women were pushed out of their new jobs to make room for returning veterans.
Until the early 1960s, newspapers even published separate job listings for men and women. Jobs were categorized according to sex. The higher level jobs listed almost exclusively under "Help Wanted—Male." In some cases the ads ran identical jobs under male and female listings—but each ad had separate pay scales. Separate, of course, meant unequal: between 1950 and 1960, women with full time jobs earned on average between 59–64 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in the same job.
When the Equal Pay Act on June 10, 1963 (effective June 11, 1964) was passedto amendthe Fair Labor Standards Act, and was originally enacted and aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex. Employers may not pay unequal wages to men and women who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment.
Many discriminatory compensation systems have been discontinued but still have those same discriminatory effects on current salaries. For example, if an employer has a compensation practice that pays Hispanic/Latino employees lower salaries than other employees, the employer must not only adopt a new nondiscriminatory compensation policy, it also must eliminate salary disparities that began prior to the effective date of the new policy and make the victims whole.
Another form of employer discrimination would be shown if an employer sets the compensation for jobs mostly held by, for example, women or African-Americans below the compensation level suggested by the employer 's job evaluation study, while the pay for jobs predominately held by men or whites is consistent with the level suggested by the job evaluation study. Also, if an employer were to maintain a neutral compensation policy or practice that has a negative impact on employees in a protected class and cannot be justified as job-related and consistent with business necessity. For example, if an employer provides extra compensation to employees who are married with dependents and the primary financial contributor to the household, the practice may have an unlawful disparate impact on women.

There were also two cases that passed in 1970 and 1974 which aimed to strengthen The Equal Pay Act. Those cases were Schultz vs. Wheaton Glass Co. (1970), U.S. Court of Appeals, and Corning Glass Works v. Brennan (1974), U.S. Supreme Court.
Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. (1970), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, ruled that jobs need to be "substantially equal" but not "identical" to fall under the protection of the Equal Pay Act. An employer cannot, for example, change the job titles of women workers in order to pay them less than men.
Corning Glass Works v. Brennan (1974), U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that employers cannot justify paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the "going market rate." A wage differential occurring "simply because men would not work at the low rates paid women" was unacceptable.

In 2009, President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which allows victims of pay discrimination to file a complaint with the government against their employer within 180 days of their last paycheck. Previously, victims were only allowed 180 days from the date of the first unfair paycheck. This Act is named after a former employee of Goodyear who alleged that she was paid 15%-40% less than her male counterparts, which was later found to be an accurate account. President Obama has vowed to reduce the wage gap between the genders: women currently make approximately 80 cents for every dollar that men earn. In April 2014, he signed two executive orders to help eliminate wage disparities among federal contract workers. One order bans federal contractors from punishing workers who discuss salaries with co-workers, and the other calls on the Labor Department to create rules that require federal contractors to submit salary information, broken down by race and gender, to the department. The day after Obama signed the orders, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have imposed the measures included in the executive orders on the entire American workforce. It was the third time since 2010 that the Senate failed to consider the legislation.Women have made progress in the workforce since the Equal Pay Act, but the fact remains that five decades later the basic goal of the act has not been realized by all parties.
Texas for one is an at-will employment state which means you may be fired atany time without cause, for any reason (except for a few illegal reasons). If the employer decides to let you go, that 's the end of your job--and you have very limited legal rights to fight your termination.
If you are employed at will, your employer does not need good cause to fire you. In every state but Montana (which protects employees who have completed an initial "probationary period" from being fired without cause), employers are free to adopt at-will employment policies, and many of them have. In fact, unless your employer gives some clear indication that it will only fire employees for good cause, the law presumes that you are employed at will.
Bottom line is if you feel that you have been discriminated against you as an employee need to know what your rights are, as no one will stand up for you but yourself. In 1998 I personally experienced discrimination against me because I was pregnant. I had a customer who owned a restaurant, but his money that he brought in to deposit had a bad smell. Due to the pregnancy, every time he came in with the smelly money, the smell made me nauseated. Rather than let someone else work with that client, my hours were changed, and I was moved from full time to part time as I was told I couldn’t pick and choose my customers were. It wasn’t as if I would be pregnant for more than a few more months. I was 18 at the time and was completely unaware of my rights under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1987. Had I been more educated at the time about what my rights were my situation may have turned out differently? Knowledge is power, and you must know your rights to be able to succeed.

Bibliography
Companies, The McGraw Hill. McGraw Hill Business Law I, 2012. n.d.
Info Please.com. n.d. : The Wage Gap: A History of Pay Inequity and the Equal Pay Act | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/equalpayact1.html#ixzz31LvGlh1k (accessed April 30, 2014).
Nolo.com. n.d. http://nolo.com (accessed April 29, 2014).
Wikipedia. n.d. http:/wikipedia.com (accessed April 2014).

Bibliography: Companies, The McGraw Hill. McGraw Hill Business Law I, 2012. n.d. Info Please.com. n.d. : The Wage Gap: A History of Pay Inequity and the Equal Pay Act | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/equalpayact1.html#ixzz31LvGlh1k (accessed April 30, 2014). Nolo.com. n.d. http://nolo.com (accessed April 29, 2014). Wikipedia. n.d. http:/wikipedia.com (accessed April 2014).