Discrimination and Diversity

Always a rather interesting topic in the workplace, discrimination is a practice that sometimes occur in the work arena. To point out first, discrimination by definition is: The distinguished treatment of something or someone solely based on their membership. Treatment and membership are the key words for this topic. Treatment is how the situation is handled and membership is the classification of said person or things. So that being said, there is such thing as legal discrimination in the workplace. Legal discrimination is all about the ability of someone and if they can perform a task required for your business.If they cannot, you can legally discriminate someone from a job. However, this practice is overtly exploited in the sense of hospitality and management level. To be honest, most managers sometimes do not do everything by the book. People are prone to being human and performing human like qualities at their position. I have at first hand experienced in a restaurant the “seniority” theory and the new guy treatment. I have been cut hours, I’ve even had hourly pay cut from my tip and lost in the complete jargoon of explaining how my tip-out covered my hourly wage. Discrimination comes in many forms other than the job acceptance level. Make no mistake, its out there and its well practiced and perfected by people who allow such performances.

In my professional opinion, this topic is something I refer to as a necessary evil. Hear me out: I’m not condoning the practice of discrimination on the level of race, age, nationality, job class, or even personality. I do however, understand that some levels of discrimination is needed, especially in the efforts to show who is in charge. This isn’t kindergarten anymore, when your in a position of a manager, you have to do unethical things and how you put a touch on it that will be perceived that way. If you have to discipline someone and its based on how they treat a person or how they treat other people, you have to be decisive and to the point and explaining why. From my perspective, if people get along better with others, you schedule them together. It comes with the job that you have to be a median a representative of the company and you HAVE to be legally correct. Other then that though, discrimination should only ever be looked at only as a performance based opinion. Dismissal or not hiring someone should always be legally correct. Do it by the book everytime: you rehearse what your going to say, you document what you have to say, and you have both parties sign the document. If you do this, there is little that can go wrong on a legal matter.

As always, a little eye candy for your afterthoughts.