Equal Employment Opportunity and Anti-Discrimination Laws Term Paper

features of a major area of law. The second part of the scholarly paper presents a thorough review of an organizational problem based on the rules and regulations presented in the first part of the research paper.

The reference page appends twelve sources in APA format.

Equal Employment Opportunity and Anti-discrimination Laws

The academic world as well as the world of profession and occupation offers uncountable options in the form of innumerable areas of study, review and critique. The world where we live in thus needs to provide equal opportunity to all for this is the world where souls thrive and excel by being successful in different areas of study. Apart from various areas of study and scrutiny including psychology, physiology, chemistry, biology, botany, physics, general science, general knowledge, computer sciences, management, marketing, mathematics and several languages, law is one of the most thriving, ancient and popular as well as a highly significant area of theory and application, study and practice. It is law that equips the people who believe in it with hope to find justice and to fight back injustices. It is the law that provides its followers and the people of the world with a thorough system to follow and to make decisions accordingly. It is the law that helps authorities maintain peace and harmony at all levels of the society and assists authorities in charge to set limits and take appropriate actions. Thus, law is that force, that area of study and that helpful tool and powerful guide that binds all strings of the society together thereby providing a thorough system of values, rules and regulations for the people of the society or of the country for that matter to abide by. On the same account, this research paper is divided into two distinct parts. Part one of our scholarly paper studies the rules and regulations presented to the people by the area of law that provides anti-discriminatory laws thereby offering equal employment opportunities to all the people entering and wanting to be the part of the corporate world by providing their services or with the aid of their talent or educational qualifications. The second part of our research paper, however, will apply the knowledge learnt as well as the information given in the first part of the paper to a problem or an issue faced in an organizational setting. Thus begins the first part of our research paper.

Part One: Equal Employment Opportunity & Anti-discriminatory Laws

Law offers equal opportunity in employment to all the citizens worldwide with the aid of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This is done because the people of the world particularly those that constituted the under privileged lot felt a strong need to speak up their minds and raise their opinions against the discrimination that is prevalent in varied forms at different levels of the society. Thus in order to curb the problem of discrimination in the employment sector, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission abbreviated as EEOC came into existence under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and started functioning on July 2, 1965 (U.S. EEOC: An Overview, Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs, 1998). Thus, with the aid of the drafting and implementation of several anti-discriminatory laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provides its citizens with the employment opportunity that strictly forbids discrimination at all grounds and on all basis and in any form. "The EEOC carries out its work at headquarters and in 50 field offices throughout the United States. Individuals who believe they have been discriminated against in employment begin our processes by filing administrative charges. Individual Commissioners may also initiate charges that the law has been violated. Through the investigation of charges, if the EEOC determines there is "reasonable cause" to believe that discrimination has occurred, it must then seek to conciliate the charge to reach a voluntary resolution between the charging party and the respondent. If conciliation is not successful, the EEOC may bring suit in federal court. Whenever the EEOC concludes its processing of a case, or earlier upon the request of a charging party, it issues a "notice of right to sue" which enables the charging party to bring an individual action in court" (U.S. EEOC: An Overview, Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs, 1998). The primary statutes that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission includes are as follows: (U.S. EEOC: An Overview, Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs, 1998) (*All the pointers below or the statues enforced by the commission given below are taken verbatim from the source under consideration)

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, as amended (ADEA), which prohibits employment discrimination against individuals 40 years of age and older;

the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in compensation for substantially similar work under similar conditions;

the Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of disability in both the public and private sector, excluding the federal government;

the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which includes provisions for monetary damages in cases of intentional discrimination and clarifies provisions regarding disparate impact actions; and,

Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, which prohibits employment discrimination against federal employees with disabilities.

Thus in order to study in detail as well as to provide an analysis of the anti-discriminatory laws that are enforced by the equal employment opportunity commission which serves as the most adequate and sound platform for the people world over, our research paper will now provide a detailed account of each principal anti-discriminatory law that helps people fight for their right to equal employment opportunity.

I. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

According to the EEOC, the purpose of which is "to promote equal opportunity in employment through administrative and judicial enforcement of the federal civil rights laws and through education and technical assistance" (U.S. EEOC: An Overview, Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs, 1998), no employer has the right to discriminate its employees on the grounds of race, color, caste, creed, language, origin that is national identity or sexual orientation (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964, 1997). Law permits the people of the world to fight for their rights and to face the challenge of employment discrimination with the help of Title VII of the Civil rights Act of 1964 that permits individuals to file charges against their employees that indulge into employment discrimination in any form thereby violating the law that states according to the Section 703 of the act in the following words:

a) "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer

1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964, 1997).

Thus with the enforcement of this act, the American law helps the people to protect themselves from any kind of employment discrimination. On the same account, the minorities belonging to different race and origin as well as having distinct color of skin are protected against all forms of employment discrimination in America and can therefore file charges against those employers that fail to obey the rules and regulations set forth by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thus, in companies where promotions are withheld and employees are deprived of an opportunity to excel in their field of chosen profession for which they have the talent as well as are qualified, employees can fight against the employment discrimiantion applying the rules and regulations as set forth in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, those employers that fail to adhere to the civil rights act of 1964 in a manner that they do not refer or recommend an employee or an applicant are termed as the violators of the law and are therefore subject to the penalties that the law has drafted for them (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964, 1997). In addition to the above, it is an "unlawful employment practice for a labor organization to exclude or to expel from its membership, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (2) to limit, segregate, or classify its membership or applicants for membership, or to classify or fail or refuse to refer for employment any individual, in any way…