Equal Employment Opportunities

Business owners have many decisions to make concerning their employees on daily basis. It is an ethical obligation for the management to ensure all their staffs are treated equally regardless of their sex, race, gender, religion, age and nationality. It is illegal to make decisions that discriminate others in a working environment during hiring, firing, promotion and compensation of personnel. Equal Employment Opportunities is therefore defined as not discriminating against workforces or job interviewees based on their protected characteristics such as nationality, religion, gender etc. (Sherman, 2018).

There are four main theories of employment discrimination that are categorized according to how the protected characteristics of workers are violated. They include harassment, disparate treatment, retaliation and disparate impact. Harassment is a form of intentional discrimination. The core background of this theory is sexual harassment in form of a person making undesirable sexual advances or requesting sexual favors. The submission or rejection of a staff to such harassment can be used as a background to make employment decisions such as hiring, termination and promoting. Harassment also includes the violation of other protected characteristics such as race and religion. Disparate impact discrimination occurs when employers formulate policies that appear to be nondiscriminatory and unbiased on its surface but tends to have unduly adverse effect on people under the protected characteristics statutory. Some practices that have been found to disparate impact effects on people under the protected characteristics include: setting up of minimum physical requirements such height and body weight, conducting of physical agility tests and clean shaven wants (Malleson, 2018). All these activities will have a tendency of ensuring that only specific people will be favored by the employer based on gender, color, physicality, sex etc.

Protected characteristics are important because they ensure all employees are protected in a working environment against harassment and abuse. They also provide a foundation that guides employers to treat all job seekers and workers equally and fairly.

Bibliography

Malleson, K. (2018). Equality Law and the Protected Characteristics. Modern Law Review, 598-621.

Sherman, F. (2018, August 1). What Is Equal Opportunity Employment? Retrieved 5 16, 2020, from Chron: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/equal-opportunity-employment-895.html