Race Discrimination
Race discrimination is treating individuals differently in their employment because of their race, color, or ethnic origin. If you have been rejected for employment, fired or otherwise harmed in your employment because of your race, then you may have suffered race discrimination.
Here are some examples of potentially illegal race discrimination:
- Hiring/Firing/Promotions:You apply for a job for which you have experience and excellent qualifications, but you are not hired because some of the company’s long-time clients are not comfortable dealing with African-Americans. You are told that you are being laid off due to company cutbacks and reorganization, while white employees with the same job and with less seniority than you keep their jobs. You have worked for your company for several years, receiving exemplary reviews and an employee-of-the-year award, yet each of the five times you have applied for promotions, the positions you applied for are instead filled by less qualified people of a different race.
- Pay:You worked your way up from the position of executive assistant to project manager. A white project manager with similar training and work experience was recently hired, and you find out that he will be paid more than you. You are a top salesperson for your company, but are moved to a less desirable territory because it is a minority neighborhood, while another white employee with much lower sales is given your territory and client base, enabling him to make much more in commissions than you will make for several years.
- Job Classification:You work at a company that has an eight-tier job classification system; your responsibilities have increased over time, but your job classification and pay has remained stagnant; white colleagues have their job classification and pay adjusted to reflect their increased responsibilities.
- Harassment:One of your coworkers thinks it’s “funny” to use the “n word” in conversation and to tell jokes insulting blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities; these comments make you very uncomfortable, and you’ve asked him to stop, but he tells you that you need to get a sense of humor; the boss tells you to ignore him, but doesn’t talk to or discipline your coworker for his harassing behavior.
If anything similar to these examples has happened to you on the job, you may have suffered race discrimination. Federal law prohibits basing employment decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about abilities, traits, or the performance of individuals of certain racial groups. It makes illegal both intentional discrimination as well as job policies that appeal neutral but in fact are not job-related and disproportionately harm workers of certain races.
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Courtesy of Workplace Fairness. For more information regarding the article, visit http://www.workplacefairness.org/race-discrimination#1
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