Employment Discrimination Law in The United States

Employment Discrimination Law In The United States

In the United States, employment discrimination is prohibited by a collection of state and federal laws, as well as by ordinances of counties and municipalities. Only discrimination based on certain characteristics (protected categories) is illegal.

The United States Constitution prohibits discrimination by federal and state governments. Discrimination in the private sector is not directly constrained by the Constitution, but has become subject to a growing body of federal and state law. Federal law prohibits discrimination in a number of departments, including recruiting, hiring, job evaluations, promotion policies, training, compensation and disciplinary action. State laws often extend protection to additional categories or employers.

Under Federal law, employers generally cannot discriminate against employees on the basis of:

  • Race
  • Sex
  • Pregnancy
  • Religion
  • National origin
  • Disability (physical or mental, including HIV status)
  • Age (for workers over 40)
  • Military service or affiliation
  • Bankruptcy or bad debts
  • Genetic information
  • Citizenship status (for citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, refugees, and asylees)

Read more about Employment Discrimination Law In The United States:  Constitutional Basis, Federal Laws, State Law, Government Employees, Unintentional Discrimination, Enforcing Entities

Famous quotes containing the words united states, employment, law, united and/or states:

    “The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
    —William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    “It is the business of the wealthy man
    To give employment to the artisan.”
    —Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)

    “Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”
    —Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    “What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
    —Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)

    “On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”
    —Gore Vidal (b. 1925)