Question

The civil rights act has significant impact on human resource law. Yet, the civil rights act does not cover all minorities, groups, or classes of people. Should it be expanded? Or does the law encompass enough that the groups not mentioned are essentially covered? Any specific examples you want to share from your personal work experience? I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Answer 1

Civil rights act provides protection to often neglected classes or classes that were discriminated at the time when the laws were amended. This is why in the last amendment the Title VII provided protection to gender discrimination, racial discrimination, age discrimination, and other discriminations based on nationality, religion, etc. This actually provides considerable coverage for the people who are often discriminated against at workplace and could have been put into a disadvantageous situation due to their position or background.

At our workplace, when I received a promotion and began interviewing people, our HR had specifically mentioned that we are not allowed to be biased based on the protected classes and we cannot dismiss these candidates straight away. This is an example of how the Civil Rights Act has impacted our workplace.

One key point that is relevant today is the issue of sexual orientation. Given that at the point of last amendment, the LGBT community was not very prominent. However, nowadays it is quite open for people to belong to this community and Civil Rights Act does not provide them any protection even though they may be severely discriminated against. Other than this, protection is provided to most other vulnerable categories of people.