Discrimination Legislation – a Money Making Tool?

Discrimination Legislation – A money making tool?

1.0 Introduction

In the late 1980s and early 1990s many writers predicted that due to demographic changes in the population, there would be an increase of diversity in the workforce (Jamieson and O’Mara, 1991; Christensen, 1993; Ross and Schneider, 1992; Johnston and Packer, 1987). In order to manage this increasingly diverse workforce diversity management has been hailed as an effective human resource strategy. This relatively new approach has emerged from earlier concepts of equal opportunity and affirmative action (Thomas, 1990). Both equal opportunity and affirmative action are primarily legally driven, whereas diversity management is driven by the business case (Kandola and Fullerton, 1994). Additionally, equal opportunity and affirmative action focus on disadvantaged or under-represented groups, and the characteristics which these groups share, while the key assumption underlying diversity management is that all individuals are unique.

The CIPD (2005) defines diversity as “valuing everyone as individuals – as employees, customers and clients”

While Kandola and Fullerton (1994) gives a much broad definitions of diversity management:

“The basic concept of managing diversity accepts that the workforce consists of a diverse population of people. The diversity consists of visible and non-visible differences which will include factors such as sex, age, background, race, disability, personality and work style. It is founded on the premise that harnessing these differences will create a productive environment in which everybody feels valued, where their talents are being fully utilised and in which organisational goals are met.”

Basically, diversity management is about recognising the value of all employees and making employment decisions based solely on objective, job-related criteria rather than on the personal characteristic on of the individual (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2006).

The purpose of this...