US House Approves Protections for Gay Workers

[Caligastia]

"perceived sexual orientation" ???

Does this mean you can't discriminate against girly straight men or manly straight women?

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Caligastia
"perceived sexual orientation" ???

Does this mean you can't discriminate against girly straight men or manly straight women?

Yep. You can't discriminate against a person because he was gay, and later raise a defense that you were mistaken and he's really straight.

[Asher]

Welcome to the modern world.

[Caligastia]

Without being in the mind of the employer, how is unlawful discrimination proven?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Caligastia
Without being in the mind of the employer, how is unlawful discrimination proven?

Mostly by they say and how they treat particular groups of people. If there are, say, 25 promotions since he's been the boss and none have been black, even though blacks make up 50% of the workforce and have been equally qualified for the positions, that's probably a good case. Or if no Hispanics have been promoted and he's making horribly inappropriate Latino jokes (that in itself can be a hostile work environment claim, of course).

[Caligastia]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


Mostly by they say and how they treat particular groups of people. If there are, say, 25 promotions since he's been the boss and none have been black, even though blacks make up 50% of the workforce and have been equally qualified for the positions, that's probably a good case.

Whether people are "equally qualified" or not can be pretty difficult to determine for those outside the work environment.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Caligastia


Whether people are "equally qualified" or not can be pretty difficult to determine for those outside the work environment.

It can be for individual cases, certainly; but I don't think cases like this come up for one single person very often unless there is additional evidence (statements made or such). If you have numbers - like Imran's - that show a significant statistical case, it's pretty hard to argue with that. Even if "equally qualified" is limited to specific characteristics, such as length of employment, attendance, and review scores, you can make a pretty obvious case that they are discriminating without knowing the specific intangibles.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Caligastia
Whether people are "equally qualified" or not can be pretty difficult to determine for those outside the work environment.

That's why you have expert witnesses and testimony . And really the qualification thing is a rebuttal. If you have overwhelming numbers, then the employer has to show that it wasn't racist. He may use qualification, but has to show why every black guy who applied was not as qualified.

But in the end, it's fact specific.

[Kuciwalker]

I'm curious how much of a real problem this is... and if it's more of a problem than yet another law like this.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Ask the gay folks .

And yes, there have been people who have been fired from their jobs for simply being gay. What this bill ALSO does is elevate sexual orientation as a protected class, meaning they can claim a hostile work environment. And there are many places of work that currently tolerate put downs of gays or people who tell a lot of inappropriate gay jokes, making gay people feel uncomfortable in their places of work.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Ask the gay folks .

What do you think I just did?

And yes, there have been people who have been fired from their jobs for simply being gay.

I'm not convinced that this is a problem the way it was for sex or race. I'm not opposed to the idea, I just haven't seen evidence for it.

What this bill ALSO does is elevate sexual orientation as a protected class, meaning they can claim a hostile work environment. And there are many places of work that currently tolerate put downs of gays or people who tell a lot of inappropriate gay jokes, making gay people feel uncomfortable in their places of work.

People getting fired/sued for using "that's gay" in a derogatory sense is a good feature of the law?

Maybe it would be better if people didn't say things like that, but putting it into law strikes me as a bad thing.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
People getting fired/sued for using "that's gay" in a derogatory sense is a good feature of the law?

Maybe it would be better if people didn't say things like that, but putting it into law strikes me as a bad thing.

If its an isolated thing, why would they get fired or sued? After all, people don't get fired for saying silly things about 'women drivers' in isolation. I don't think any homosexual would necessarily consider that as dramatically altering their work environment or being all that severe. Now if they used it all the time and referred to the gay worker as "***" or kept on talking about gay people should be shot, then you have a case.

Think of, say, what blacks had to deal with in their employment in certain areas of the country in the 60s (Hell, even in the 80s and 90s in some incidents).

[DRoseDARs]

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02878r.pdf

[Kuciwalker]

From that article (no I haven't read it all, I skimmed to the end):

Relatively Few Complaints Have Followed Enactment of State Sexual Orientation Protection Laws

We found that, in those states with a law making it illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation, relatively few complaints of such discrimination have been made. The statistics do not show any trend in the number of complaints over time.

I read that as meaning this is a non-issue that doesn't need legal intervention.

[DRoseDARs]

Er, it's not an article it's an official government report from July 2002. The GAO is an agency within Congress established by law in 1921. And if the number of reported cases is low enough, you think discrimination based on something other than job performance and/or job qualifications is OK, Kuci? What kind of bullsh*t reasoning is that?

You must remember that GBLT persons make up a smaller portion of the wider US population than most other groups. Of course the number of reported cases is going to be small compared to other minorities, not just because of our smaller numbers but also because the fear of reporting discrimination and suffering repercussions is still very much ingrained within our group as we've not been protected as long as other groups nor universally by federal law. Other minorities and women still sometimes fail to report discrimination even though they've been protected longer and nationally.

Percentage-wise, from their numbers I get an average ~2.2% of discrimination cases are sexual orientation-based from 1990-2001. There are no consistent trends, but I'm sure if you broke the numbers down among the various groups of discriminated persons, they'd likewise show wavering trends over the same period. Sometimes the percentage increased when the total number of cases went down, sometimes the percentage went down as more cases were reported, sometimes they were in sync. I imagine it's the same for any group. So you're definitely reading more into that section than anything they said, Kuci.