HRM 320 Discrimination Paper

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HRM 320: Discrimination Paper Inevitably, everyone will experience a form of discrimination at least once in their life. Judgments are made from the simplest and most natural aspects of what makes us individuals. For instance, your nationality, social class, level of education, genetic traits, and religion are scrutinized out of fear and lack of understanding. Discrimination happens everywhere. For this reason the federal government has created laws, executive orders, and prohibitions to protect citizens against the acts of discrimination. Definitions and Differences Legal scholar and feminist Catherine Mackinnon defined sexual harassment as the unwanted imposition of sexual requirement in the context of a relationship of unequal power…show more content…
These may include the frequency of the discriminatory conduct, its harshness, whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, a mere offensive utterance, or whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance. The Supreme Court clarified the latitude of actionable sexual harassment in 1998 in two landmark cases – Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth and Faragher v. city of Boca Raton. In Ellerth and Faragher, the Court established a new standard for establishing an employer’s vicarious liability for sexual harassment by a supervisor (Druhan, 2013). The inquiry begins with an examination of whether the complainant has suffered a “tangible employment action” in connection with gender-based, unwelcome conduct (Druhan, 2013). Sexual Harassment Policies The laws against sexual harassment are intended to protect employees from harassment by their superiors, colleagues, and patrons or clienteles, which an operative has to interact with in the workplace. The federal law prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace via Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII applies to most private and public employers, labor organizations, employment agencies, and joint employer-union apprenticeship programs with 15 or more employees. Employers are vicariously responsible for their supervisors’ palpable employment actions undertaken in return for sex with a subordinate or for a subordinate’s refusal to engage in sex. However, in the absence of a palpable employment action, a favorable defense is accessible to the employer. A favorable defense can be raised by an employer that exercised judicious caution to safeguard against and suitably address sexually harassing behavior by establishing a process for filing grievances where the ill-treated operative failed to take benefit of it. A reproduction of the sexual harassment policy must be

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