Equal Employment Opportunity

Equal employment opportunity

These are laws designed to protect employees from discrimination based on race, color, political affiliation, religion, sex and nation of origin by the Civil rights Act of 1964 that was amended and was enhanced by the then president, Lyndon Johnson, by the executive order 11246 and amended in 1965 which was created specifically for federal contractors against discriminating employees. Thus it is the policy of CDC to provide employment opportunities for all persons without any form of discrimination either because of; age, color, religion, sex, disability, nation of origin and race. The goals and plans to achieving this policy are spelt out in the affirmative employment program. This implies that a performance covering equal employment opportunity will be rated based on support and non-discriminatory behaviors in promotions, hiring, career development, recruitment and during employee awards.

The discriminatory factors like race means that discrimination occurs when a person is treated differently than the others simply because of different characteristics lie physical features that can be traced to their indigenous race. For color it implies that a person is treated differently because s/he has a different pigmentation (Equal Employment Opportunity 2000).

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action is defined as the policies that were designed by the federal government and other institutions to promote the minority groups who were seen to have been traditionally discriminated against and thus reverse past discrimination by giving them preferential treatment in access to education, employment, healthcare and social welfare. The federal agencies implemented the policy enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and some other two executive orders. The limitation of this affirmative action is that it brings about reverse discrimination due to the racial quotas allocated. Its debate has grown murky and difficult especially between blacks and whites. Another is difficulty is implementation to accrue full benefits intended for, an example is in 1987, paradise, where a racist Alabama department of Public Safety refused to promote all blacks even after court orders demanded so. The Supreme Court has also been faulted for its divided opinions on affirmative action mainly because of different and opposing political ideologies. An example is Bakke case of 1978 where the said was a white male and was denied vacancy for two years consecutively by a medical school although they accepted less qualified blacks than Bakke. Although the court upheld the affirmative action per se in the above case, the same court outlawed inflexible quota systems (Brunner B. 2009).  

The term diversity is used to mean the differences in races and ethnic classifications that do exist. Thus accepting, understanding, valuing, acknowledging and celebrating these classifications that do exist among people with respect to; age, class, physical & mental ability, race, sexual orientation, religion and gender is defined as diversity. Due to the ever increasing differences of the US population, diversity issues are taking centre stage and several companies are being told to be inclusive of the diversity that does exist as it is likely yield high productivity. Also due to demographic changes, organizations are required to review their management practices and be creative on how to approach people. This will mean diversity as having a government approved number for each race, gender and ethnicity in the work place and learning institutions, this implies that diversity is both beneficial to both employers and associates by increased productivity. Although laudable, diversity lowers the accountability standards necessary to push students or employers to perform better. Also some negative attitudes in the work place like stereotyping and prejudice can be barriers to organizational diversity (University of Florida, EDIS 2009).