Employment Discrimination

There are a whole host of acts of law in regard to employment discrimination and equality. Every employer must ensure that its employees have equal chance and opportunity in employment. This means that the Company must provide a policy to help ensure that no unlawful employment discrimination occurs, either directly or indirectly, against any person on the grounds of age, gender, colour, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, race, religion, religious beliefs, nationality, ethnic or national origin.

Direct Employment Discrimination

Direct employment discrimination is where a person is treated less favourably than another one.

An example, direct employment discrimination would be, if the Company did not employ a woman because she might have children or where the Company did not consider an Asian employee because of their nationality. It would also be direct discrimination lf the Company did not give the same training to a disabled person because of the lack of wheelchair access.

Indirect Employment Discrimination

Indirect employment discrimination is where the effect of a requirement or condition imposed by the Company cannot be justified and where that has an unfavourable or unreasonable impact on a group of people.

An example of indirect employment discrimination is where a Company might place an unnecessary condition or requirement on a particular job to prevent certain people from applying. e.g. that only people who speak fluent English should apply where the job does not clearly require great verbal skills, can be seen as indirectly placing prejudicial conditions on a job.