Workplace Discrimination

Not much more than a generation ago, legal sanctions limiting discrimination in the workplace, whether against racial minorities, women, or other groups, were nearly unknown and to most people almost unthinkable. The decision of a private employer to hire, promote, or fire an employee was (within narrow constraints set by labor laws) a purely private matter; an employer could make those decisions for good reasons, bad reasons --including race or gender--or for no reason at all.

In many states, racial discrimination was the law of the land, and it was accepted or endured as a fact of social life even in regions that rejected official segregation and other discriminatory laws. As for what is now called gender discrimination, it was so taken for granted that for most people the concept hardly existed. The very presence of a woman in the workplace was regarded as, in a way, temporary, "until she got married," or it was due to some special contingency. Most working women were found in occupations regarded as female, such as secretarial work. Sexual jokes, innuendoes, or pressures were limited only by the goodwill of male coworkers.

All of this began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the progress of the Civil Rights movement. The argument was increasingly made that ending legal discrimination, e.g., segregation, would not end the second-class citizenship of African-Ame

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ng discussion applies to civil cases only. In the first stage, the burden is on the plaintiff--the person alleging workplace discrimination--to demonstrate a prima facie ("on the face of it") case for discrimination. This is usually some pattern that, unless some other reason could be shown, would point toward discrimination. A typical example would be an employer who disproportionately hires few minorities or women. Such measures, however, have in turn led to the whole debate about affirmative action and "quotas," to be dealt with below. In cases of workplace harassment, credible allegations of incidents of harassing behavior (e.g., sexual innuendo directed at women employees) are prima facie evidence, though the incidents must then be proven as fact at trial. Once a prima facie case has been shown, the process enters its second stage, the trial, and the burden shifts to the defendant (the employer) to show that the seeming prima facie evidence does not actually hold up. An employer might seek to show that members of a minority group have been hired in reasonable proportion to those who applied (and that they have not been discouraged from applying). Antidiscrimination Law: The Arguments In every case, going back to
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Approximate Word count = 2614
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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