Free Paper Example on Employee Discrimination

Introduction

Every organization's success and the general attainment of goals and objectives define specific stipulations of rules, regulations, policies, and ethics among the employees in the workplace. The latter often shapes from the relayed rules, regulations, and policies that guide the workers to create and have harmonious and conducive environments of work to aid their better performance. However, despite these apparent stipulations, workplace organizations still experience a vast range of problems that affects the employees and the entire companies, most of which reflect in their poor performance and failure to fulfill the drafted goals and objectives for a particular work season. Among the many employee-related ethical issues in organizations are the problem of worker discrimination and harassment. The vice pegs to and triggers various diversities among the workers, including the issues related to the employees' disabilities, age, payment inequalities, matters of pregnancies, individual race and ethnicity, religion, and gender.

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It is consequently essential to know the various types of harassment and discrimination among employees, where, how, and by whom they perpetrate, how they affect the employees' performance in the place of work, the measures to implement towards curbing and eradicating them, as well as how they generally affect organizations' entire performance and success. The paper, therefore, identifies and discusses the different types of harassment and discrimination as experienced in various workplace environments, how they affect the employees' individual being and work performance, the entire organizations' success as well as the measures to combat and eradicate them.

Types of Discrimination and Harassment

Although the harassment and discrimination policies in diverse organizational settings vary differently in treatment ways, they both apply in the protection of workers from various circumstances and backgrounds. According to the EEOC, many types of harassment and discrimination categorizes in different statutes. Still, the prone ones include disability, age, wage inequality, race and color, gender, pregnancy, and religion (Crane et al., 2019). For disability, equal treatment and accommodations must be under-provision to be compliant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (Towbin et al., 2019). The work policy against age discrimination usually reflects those employees aged 40 years and above, but also applies to given ageist treatment and policies (Towbin et al., 2019).

Regarding payment equality, every employee in the same line of work must receive the same pay regardless of their religion, race, or gender, among other factors. Every employee must, therefore, receive equal job treatment despite their color, race and ethnicity, religion, or gender, and the same also applies to pregnant workers. They should as well receive other unique treatments at work due to their health conditions.

Discrimination

Discrimination can perpetrate against an individual employee in their places of work in many different ways. An act of discrimination may refer to any given treatment that impacts an employee negatively regarding their job (Girvan, 2020). They can include any specific thing related to their job's roles, duties, and responsibilities, which may appear negative, weird, or unbearable among other employees and employers. Discrimination in employment can thus happen in several situations, like suggestion preferences concerning candidates for a particular employment advertisement, exclusion of potential workers during hiring, denying a certain group of workers their benefits or compensations, and offering different wages to the same type of employees. It can also occur when discriminatingly assigning employees their options of retirement, maternity, or disability leave. Employment discrimination also occurs in the encounters of disruption or denial of the company facilities and resources of work to certain employees and the imposition of favoritism to some groups of workers during the issuance of lay-offs and promotions. Several types of discrimination that are work-based remain to be a serious concern under the laws of EEOC, and are inclusive of the following:

Workplace Age Discrimination

As per the laws of EEOC and the federal legislation, age discrimination against an employee at the workplace remains prohibited and illegal. With the exceptions of some few scenarios, the above entities forbid companies from providing specificities about the preference of employees' ages during their advertisements of job opportunities. An example of age discrimination against employees is where an employer sacks or replaces a worker claiming that they are old. Yet, they are still equally productive as their younger colleagues. Workers must get similar privileges of employment despite their age differences unless the expenditures incurred in the provision of benefits that are supplemental to younger employees equals that of offering decreased benefits to the workers who are older (Stypinska & Turek, 2017). The age-based discrimination in opportunities for internships or programs of apprenticeship also remains illegal and prohibited.

Workplace Disability Discrimination

Practically, there are many scenarios where employers refuse to recruit qualified disabled candidates for jobs in their companies. Disability discrimination refers to a situation where an employer denies a qualified job candidate an opportunity to work for them or purely penalizing such workers because as per the basis of their disability (Stypinska & Turek, 2017). For instance, an employer may decide to underpay a lame secretary instead of how they pay other secretaries with no disabilities. As per the 1990's Act of Americans with Disabilities, discrimination of employees, or qualified employment candidates because of their disabilities is illegal (Girvan, 2020). In practicality, the Act does not permit employers to refuse to hire disabled job applicants or to penalize such employees because of disabilities purely. As a result, it is a requirement that employers incorporate favorable accommodation for disabled employees while erecting their premises.

Workplace Pregnancy Discrimination

Pregnancy among women is a normal thing. However, some organizations treat their pregnant employees with too much consideration. Pregnancy discrimination in employment often refers to the job privileges and advantages missed by the pregnant job candidates or the already employed workers. For example, pregnant employees may feel alienated or excluded from the major organizational matters by colleagues and employers who may avoid them. According to the 1978 Act of Pregnancy Discrimination of the United States, pregnancy-based employment discrimination is illegal (Towbin et al., 2019). Therefore, all the qualified job seekers are equal and under protection by the latter, whether pregnant or not. Also, it is a requirement that employers handle matters of pregnancy normally and like other special considerations among their workers.

Harassment

Harassment in the place of work is common among employers and employees in many organizations. It is a vice that ruins excellent opportunities for employment and jobs and consequently turns a business company or organization into an unproductive and toxic job surrounding. In most cases, many scenarios end up unreported, since many of its victims are not sure whether to categorize such acts as employment harassment and even how to combat it in its situations of occurrences. As per the claims of the EEOC, harassment is an unwelcoming physical or verbal behavior that bases on color and race, age, for mostly those aged 40 years and above, religion, nationality, sex, often inclusive of pregnancy and gender, individual's genetic information, as well as disabilities that are mentally or physically related (Szende et al., 2020).

Conclusion

Arguably, discrimination and harassment are the most severe ethical concerns that significantly impact the overall performance and success of many business organizations. The reason being is that the vices manifest among the companies' labor force, whose daily work efforts steers the prosperity of their organizations. Their occurrences result in organizational devastation in reputation and finances (Nuseir & Ghandour, 2019). In as much as the laws regarding workplace harassment and discrimination exists and continues to undergo regular reforms in many organizations, multiple business organizations still experience complaints against them from many of their current or former workers yearly. As per the reports compiled and relayed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the United States of America, 2018 alone had registered 76,418 files of harassment and discrimination charges among employees against different companies, a fact that made them incur losses worth hundreds of millions (Towbin et al., 2019). Regardless of the organizations' ethical laws and policies which intend to protect employees from workplace harassment and discrimination, many of the above similar cases occur every year.