Introduction to Employment Law

The HRM legal environment has become significantly more complex in the past 30 years. There have been a significant number of laws enacted just in the past ten years that affect how organizations must do business. In addition, we have grown to believe in the value of a diverse workforce, much more so than in the 1960s and ’70s. In this course, we will explore some of the laws that HR managers have to work with on a daily basis, and we will also look in some more depth at diversity and why it is valuable in an organization.

Discrimination is the act of making distinctions or choosing one thing over another; in HR, it is making distinctions among people. So you can quickly see that we all discriminate, every day. If managers don’t discriminate, then they’re not doing their jobs. However, we want to avoid illegal discrimination based on a person’s membership in a protected class (we will discuss protected classes shortly), and we want to avoid unfair treatment of any of our employees at all times. Illegal discrimination is making distinctions that harm people and that are based on those people’s membership in a protected class.

The equal pay act requires that women who do the same job as men, in the same organization, must receive the same pay. It defines equal in terms of “equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and . . . performed under similar working conditions. While the EPA was designed to equalize pay between men and women, the act was never fully successful; but the next law we will discuss added serious consequences to such unequal treatment. It changed the way that virtually every organization in the country did business, and it even helped change employers’ attitudes about discrimination.

Even in cases where the law does not directly apply to an organization, it has been used to evaluate internal policies to attempt to ensure fairness and equity for all of our workers. The 1964 CRA states that it is illegal 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 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.”

In any management position within any organization today, you need a basic understanding of the major employment laws that are currently in effect.