Introduction

What Is Discrimination?

Discrimination is when a person is treated less favourably than another in the workplace by your Employer or other Employees, based on your traits or characteristics.

You can be discriminated against for several reasons:

• Disability;
• Age;
• gender reassignment;
• marriage or civil partnership;
• pregnancy or maternity;
• race (including colour, nationality, ethnic and national origin);
• religion or belief; and
• sex / sexual orientation.

The Equality Act 2010 (TEA 2010) prohibits discrimination for any of these reasons.

 

Direct and Indirect Discrimination

You can be discriminated against in two ways: directly or indirectly.

You are discriminated against directly when someone treats you differently based on the traits listed above. You may recognise this type of discrimination because someone asks you about your religion, your sexual orientation, your marital status, or your gender before applying for a position. Alternately, an Employer may directly specify in its company or business’s job advert that a homosexual, married or female person is not welcome in the Company.

 

You are discriminated against indirectly when the Company you work for or would like to work for requires specific arrangements or policies that restrict the employment of a person with any of the above traits. For instance, a company may advertise that only people who are born and raised in the UK can apply for their position. By doing this, the Employer may indirectly discriminate against anyone born outside the UK.

 

Some companies may be able to justify a reason for discrimination, however, it is implied, not stated. In effect the criteria for the job would not make it a suitable job for the applicant, for instance:

• Manager – minimum 5 years’ experience - anyone aged 18-23 would not have such experience;
• Finance Manager - a job that required a high level of concentration would not be suitable for someone with severe learning disabilities;
• Librarian – may not be suitable for somebody who is blind;
• Vicar / Iman etc – this would be faith specific; and
• Carer for elderly female – the employer could ask for female only staff as the lady would feel uncomfortable with a gentleman carer.

 

How we can help

We would be delighted to act on your behalf to negotiate whether there has, in our experts opinion, been any discrimination made against you or your employment application, To gain our assistance you need to open a case, this is done by taking advantage of our free consultation service, activated by the link at the top of the page, should you wish to start a case the caseworker will send you the suitable payment link. Please note your caseworker can only give generic advice, their role is to prepare your details for handling by our legal team and to act as your point of contact, they will also issue you with your Password and PIN, these will be needed to log onto your client dashboard. From your dashboard you will be able to manage and view every aspect of your case, upload documents, images, files etc.

 

Your legal team will carefully examine the employers policies/procedures on the matter and if there is an identified issue, we would seek to assist you in bringing about a fair solution by mediating between yourself and your employer. If a solution cannot be found then we would support you in lodging a claim via an employment tribunal. You should be conscious of the strict time constraints as discrimination claims must be brought to an Employment Tribunal within three months of the alleged discriminatory act. We do tend to find that employers tend to be significantly more responsive when you have taken steps to obtain professional legal advice.