Answers Posted By Karl Gerber

Answer to Termination

Every employee is protected by certain anti-discrimination laws. However, anti-discrimination laws apply to protected characteristics such as age, sex, race, disability, pregnancy, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, religion, and then some unusual ones like women wearing pants and Vietnam Veteran's Status.

Being a member of a certain job classification is not protected status. An employer can have formal corrective action plans for certain job classifications and not others. For instance, executive management is not likely to be rated with 1-5 ratings based upon attendance while an hourly employee may.

However, if there is a disproportionate impact on a protected class due to a disciplinary standard or a test as in the recent case with white fire fighters, the application of a personnel policy cannot have a disparate impact on that group.

For example, if all of the women in the company were secretaries and they could only get raises if they never came in late, and all of the men who were accounting clerks never received reviews and could come in late there could be an accusation of discrimination based upon job titles because punctuality was key for women but not mean. This is disparate impact.

posted Jul 27, 2009 9:58 PM [EST]