Equal Pay Act: Discrimination In The Workplace

Human Resource Management is the first source I used for this project. It lists and describes the equal opportunity laws enacted from 1964 to the present. I found these descriptions to be quite helpful in understand what each law covers and why. Although there were some laws barring discrimination in the United States, the “Congress and presidents avoided dramatic action on implementing equal employment until the early 1960s” (Dessler). One of the first laws to be implemented at that time was the Equal Pay Act of 1963 which stated that when jobs involved equal skills and equal work and therefore made it illegal for an employer to discriminate in pay based on an employee’s sex. The second source comes from the Workplace Fairness website. Workplace Fairness is a non-profit a non-profit organization that works to promote and protect employee rights. One area of the site focuses on the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), which includes an explanation of what the act covers and the individual’s rights regarding the act.

The website does a good job of interpreting these rules. For instance, they explain exactly what is guaranteed under the law such as, “The FMLA guarantees an employee, male or female, who has been working at least a year for a company with 50 or more employees the right to job-protected, 12-week, unpaid leave to recover from a serious medical condition or to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child, or a seriously ill child, parent or spouse”