Equal Employment Opportunity Laws and Human Resource Management

Equal Employment Opportunity Laws and Human Resource Management

Karen A. Rodríguez

SUAGM/Tampa Campus

Equal Employment Opportunity Laws and Human Resource Management

It is not uncommon for individuals who are entering the workforce to not think about whether they are being discriminated against based on their diversity. Before the implementation of the Equal Employment Opportunity laws, it was normal to see discrimination in the workplace, especially for women and ethnic minorities. Equal Employment Opportunity Laws have their origins since President Roosevelt’s Executive Order in 1941 which banned discrimination against African Americans in government defense jobs (The National WWII Museum, n.d.).

Current Equal Employment Opportunity Laws, based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Feder, 2005), have extended the range to protect citizens from being denied employment or dismissed from work based on age, race, sex, national origin, religion, or disability. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes all of the aforementioned, there are individual laws and acts which describe specifics for all of these characteristics. As professionals in human resource management, it is our responsibility to have knowledge and awareness of these anti-discriminatory laws to protect the rights and wellbeing of the organization’s employees. Given the importance of these laws, the focus of this paper is to summarize the important aspects of each specific law in a clear and concise manner.

Discrimination of age, in accordance to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (Feder, 2010), prohibits that employers treat individuals less favorably due to their age. The disadvantage of this law is that it applies exclusively to those individuals that are age 40 or older. Organizations and employers should be careful in implementing policies which might negatively impact worker’s benefits if they are over the age of 40.

As previously mentioned, race has...