Legal Topics

Author: Priyanka Saxena on Jun 16,2017

Employment Discrimination

Our jobs affect our lives to a great extent. Not only are they means of earning income and staying afloat, but our job satisfaction has a great influence on our overall mood and happiness. This is why it is so terrible if you are treated badly in your place of employment, or denied a chance to gain employment just because of some irrelevant factors that are completely out of your control and that in no way make you less qualified or competent to perform the job in question. Luckily, if you do find yourself in such a situation, there are still things that you can do end the unfair treatment.

Workplace discrimination has been around as long as workplaces. You don’t have to be employed to be a victim of discrimination, it can manifest itself through different processes, including discriminatory job advertisements which exclude certain groups of people for no good reason; training programs that are only available to certain people, recruitment stage, insufficient compensation for the work that you have done, cutting back on the benefits that you should be entitled to, and a number of other instances.

If you want to protect yourself from being discriminated against, you need to be familiar with the laws concerning employment discrimination. If you already believe that you are being treated unfairly you can always seek legal advice and make sure, but it might even be possible that your rights are being violated without you even knowing it. This is why getting acquainted with the discrimination laws in your state should be one of your priorities. State laws usually differ from the federal laws to some extent, so make sure that you have studied them well, it might make the difference between you being fired or treated poorly, and performing your job with all the rights and benefits that you are entitled to.

There are a number of groups that are the most common targets of workplace discrimination, if you belong to one of them you should reassess the way in which you are treated and try to determine whether you have a reason for complaint. People are often discriminated against on the basis of their religion, gender, marital status, age, national origin, sexual preferences, weight, disability or other factors. While your ‘peculiarity’ in this regard is not preventing you from performing your job as well as your colleagues with similar job demands who don’t belong to your, or any other protected group, you have to be treated in the same way as they are and receive the same wages and benefits, anything other than that can be considered discriminatory.

If you do realize that you are being discriminated against, you should take immediate action, some complaints might become outdated after a certain period, and you should submit your complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as soon as you realize that you are not receiving fair treatment. There are retaliation laws in place that are meant to prevent the employer from acting against an employee who filed such a complaint, and they will protect you if you do remain at your workplace after the complaint has been processed.

Olivia Still is a blogger and human rights activist. She is proactive in her struggle for justice and has attracted a number of law firms as allies in the process, Kurkowski Law being one of them.