Free Paper Sample: Equal Employment, Disparate Treatment and Equal Pay

Introduction

Equal employment opportunity is the availability of job opportunities to people without discrimination or bias. It is a view that requires employers to make unbiased decisions when selecting employees. Employment decisions are made concerning the individual's qualifications and abilities to do work without regard to personal characteristics. Disparate treatment occurs when personal factors that are not job-related are considered differently from others. Equal pay for equal work, equal pay for equal value, is the idea that men, women, people with disabilities, and others should be given the same salary if capable of completing tasks required.

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Equal Employment

Equal employment opportunity (EEO) refers to applicants seeking employment opportunities. Employees in a particular workplace place are granted similar protection without regard to personal characteristics such as origin, age, sex, race, and other biased selection criteria. When job seekers are invited to an open application for employment, it is how well one does in the interview that determines who is hired. The process of selection is expected to be after a vigorous unbiased assessment. It is challenging to invigilate the employment practices involved in the process of filling out vacant employment positions. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a commission set to sue employers in federal courts (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d). This commission has no power to order employers to stop discriminatory practices or provide back pay to a victim. The commission collects facts from all parties. Employers are required to report employment statistics annually. It sets up an out-of-court settlement and highly encourages mediation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) processes claims and investigates employment discrimination complaints against private and public entities. Suppose the commission identifies reasonable causes for action against claims of employment discrimination. In that case, it will initiate reconciliatory procedures to resolve charges to the levels of reasonable satisfaction of the complainant at the lowest level of dispute settlement. It is not limited to mediation, but in cases where valid complainants fail to meet consensus with the respondents, The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) may sue the respondent in a federal court on the complainant's behalf. In some instances, the commission may fail to file a lawsuit. The aggrieved party may file a private lawsuit against an offender within 90 days of dismissal by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

To improve fairness in filling job applications, employers focus on broken practices that cause bias in the selection process to correct and abolish historical discrimination in the organization's employment practices, such as bias against women and minority members in various groups or the disabled. Elimination of bias is done through affirmative action. In repairing broken selection systems, managers are also involved in engagements where the organization sets procedures for hiring and promoting persons from underrepresented groups to help them acquire equal opportunity for employment. Employers evaluate their organizational structure, management of different departments, and employer-employee relations to identify mishaps in recruitment practices. The affirmative action approach is one of the procedural measures undertaken to evaluate recruitment processes. In the event of complaints against an organization's bias in awarding job opportunities and the organization fails to attend to affirmative action, a court of law could order the organization to conduct the affirmative action process. The management would be encouraged to make reasonable faith efforts to meet hiring goals ensuring fair recruitment of women and minority groups. Another procedural action management could enforce the setting up of quotas. Quotas are inflexible hiring and promotional conditions set to maintain a bureaucratic hiring blueprint that specifies the percentage of women, disabled persons, racial balance, and other minority groups hired by the organization. The target objective of accommodating such persons in recruitment processes is to enable equal benefits and privileges by all applicants, including those who are minorities such as people of a different race, or those who are disadvantaged, such as the disabled. Apart from the award of equal employment opportunity, it is also essential that such persons are accommodated in the working environment (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d.). It is crucial that changes are made for the organization to have the possibility to adopt disabled persons in their working stations. It is essential to allow equal enjoyment of benefits and privileges by employees with disabilities. It is accomplished through the set quotas. Also, an organization must empower employees with suitable working environments. That includes availing physical facilities that make work more comfortable, especially for those with physical challenges, and an appropriate non-physical climate that will allow a stress-free working environment. Such measures have improved the efficiency of work output. Jobs are restructured so that marginal job functions are allocated to nondisabled employees. It will increase the proficiency of an organization to employ disabled persons (Sentrient, 2020). It is an example of discrimination in equal employment opportunities. A lot of times, these situations can lead to disparate treatment.

Disparate Treatment

Disparate treatment occurs when personal characteristics that are not job-related influence how employees are treated differently from others. It is biased towards someone of a protected class. For example, it is a disparate treatment for an employer to intentionally exclude a worker from a possible employment opportunity. This intentional bias could be a result of differences in the racial origin of the applicant, gender, religion, disability, or any other differences that may arise between an employer and the employee that is not a predefined criterion for passing the recruitment tests in the job applications ("3. Disparate treatment discrimination: Intent, bias, and the burden of proof," 2019). It is also disparate treatment when an employment authority tests the particular skills of only individual minority applicants. This type of discrimination often follows a pattern of practice over time. However, disparate impact results from policies, procedures, and systems that appear to be unbiased, but they unintentionally discriminate over protected groups. When rules and other techniques used in the application processes unintentionally discriminate against individual applicants of a minority group, it has a disparate impact. Both the disparate impact and disparate treatment are discriminatory. Federal laws prohibit them since they unfairly discriminate on race, skin color, sexual characteristics, gender, religion, origin, military status, marital status, disability, pregnant women, genetic evidence, or equal pay. At times persons denied opportunities for employment for being overqualified had termed such abjuration as being discriminated against.

Disparate treatment can trigger the rise of severe issues inside your organization. When an employer fails to hire or rejects a qualified applicant based on racial characteristics, gender, or disability bias, the organization will receive services from those employed below what they would have gained from a more qualified employee. It can lead to legal action in a court of law and consequently suffer financial and social consequences when an organization is disparately selective. It could cause a lack of diversity in the organization (Foote, n.d.). It isn't easy to find a workforce that is well motivated when they are aware that the organization's way of doing things could act against them. Loss of morale amongst employees happens when select employees are often promoted or transferred into more preferred working environments. Such disparate actions cause suspicions, loss of trust, and frustrations among the entire staff and in advanced cases where the directors are the most disparate, causing mistrust amongst the board of managers and supervisors.

Therefore, an organization must seek to ensure that it is not discriminating against different classes. Creating policies in the organizations set up to create a diverse workforce should focus on preventing disparate treatment. This starts by ensuring that your managers, hiring team, and other employees are not motivated to treat those amongst the protected classes differently. It is also necessary that all groups are welcome in your organization and enforce the policies set. An organization should also place clear guidelines on how employees get appraised, promoted, demoted, fired, and declared redundant. It is the organization's responsibility to design a recruitment process so that it is consistent and fair to all applicants; this includes creating standardized questions for all applicants in the interview process. Administering consistent procedures will reduce the likelihood of intentional discrimination. It is also crucial that a manager or the panel designing the recruitment plan criticizes the process well enough. The critiquing process is vital because the employment process can be made rigid enough to eliminate intentional bias and cause the process to have a disparate adverse impact. The same critical approach should be made when addressing appraising employees; this is a significant aspect that should be checked. Staff appraisal is a significant incentive that offers encouragement to workers. When they have faith in the organization system that more of their work output is appreciated, and the appraisal system is legit, they work harder. The organization will reap the benefits of a motivated workforce; the organization system offering promotions is also essential so that merit is clearly defined. The most deserving employees are given promotions; the review of players' transfer policies to other departments and branches is equally essential. Major conflicts arise in organization departments amongst employees when promotions or same-level department transfers are made; disparate treatment is majorly the source of such conflict. It is the organization's goal to ensure fair, competitive employee participation for efficient and effective productivity.

When an employee claims disparate treatment and alleges that they are treated differently from other employees, the details of their treatment being different are based on a protected characteristic. Like being of a different gender, race, age, religion, origin, and they are disabled or any other defined choice of discriminating the employee. The employee delivering the claim has to show the disparate treatment clearly. In the suit, the employee has to offer he or she got discriminatory treatment. The argument is to show how similarly situated the comparable employees were. Also, the employer made a decision based on the employee's protected characteristics. The complainant proves the claim of mistreatment by providing evidence, presenting a "prima facie" case as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of charges filed with the EEOC. The employer has to state a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for the decision made. The employee presents grounds to prove the employer's claim is false.