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Dave Gurke Attorney Mark Walsh Business Law 101 April 4, 2003 Job Discrimination What is discrimination? Discrimination occurs when you treat someone differently on the basis of some characteristic, such as race, gender, hair color, height, and so on. A major portion of discrimination usually happens against a minority class. Anybody who is not a non-handicapped, agnostic, born-in-America, white male, under the age of forty, fits into some minority group, or so called protected group. It is believed that seventy percent of us fall into one of the protected groups. Discrimination in the work place has been around for many years. In the past, job discrimination was routinely ignored. It happened very often, but there were no laws or any type of legal action that a person could take to stop it. If a person did speak out about it, that person was ridiculed, fired, or in some instances, even beat up by his co-workers. Today’s laws and statues make job discrimination harder to get away with than in the past. Does it still happen? Sure it does, but with today’s rules and regulations, job discrimination is a lot less scarce than in the past. There are federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, gender, pregnancy, national origin, religion, disability, and age. There are also additional laws by the different states that prohibit discrimination such as marriage, sexual orientation, and weight. Some of today’s employers go above and beyond their duty to prevent job discrimination from happening. This is especially true with a lot of the bigger company’s. They realize that in order to become a successful company they need to strictly adhere to certain in house rules that create a workplace environment that is friendly to all. Also they cannot afford to be tying up their resources in costly legal battles. One example of this is the Redmond, Washington based software company, Microsoft. Microsoft has been the target of numerous lawsuits regarding job discrimination, especially by female and minority employees. In order to curb some of these lawsuits, Microsoft hired an expert in job-equality issues. Her name, Claudette Whiting, was a former director of job equality initiatives for Dupont. Says Whiting “Microsoft understands that a culturally diverse work force is important to the company’s long-term success and will enable the company to participate and respond to the needs of a global marketplace” Discrimination can come in many different forms.
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