The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is responsible for enforcing Federal Laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of a person’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age disability or genetic information.
This past month, the EEOC updated its guidance on national origin discrimination. In this publication, the EEOC emphasized the following:
- The EEOC has defined unlawful harassment as conduct that is so severe or pervasive so as to create a work environment that a reasonable person would find intimidating, hostile or abusive. This type of harassment can take on many different forms including ridicule, intimidation, workplace graffiti and/or ethnic slurs. Employer liability can result from the actions or inactions of supervisors, employees or non-employees such as clients, customers or commercial contacts.
- National origin discrimination includes discrimination because an individual, or the individual’s ancestors, is from a certain place or shares the physical culture or language characteristics of a national origin or ethnic group. For employers, this means that national discrimination can be found based upon a person belonging to an ethnic group, but not a country.
- The country does not need to exist today in order for national origin discrimination to occur.
- National origin discrimination includes misperceptions about an individual. If an individual is treated less favorably at work because the individual is incorrectly believed to be a member of a certain ethnic language or cultural group, unlawful discrimination will be found to have occurred.
- National original discrimination can occur even if the individual is an American citizen.
While employers need to adopt a policy which prohibits national origin discrimination, employers also need to educate their management as to what constitutes national origin discrimination so as to limit exposure to these types of claims. Employers with concerns about national origin discrimination should contact their legal counsel, or one of the employment attorneys at KingSpry.
The Eastern Pennsylvania Employment Log (EPELog) is a publication of the KingSpry Employment Law Practice Group. Jeffrey T. Tucker, Esquire, is our editor-in-chief. EPELog is meant to be informational and does not constitute legal advice.
