Employment Discrimination Complaints on the Rise
A recent article in The New York Times reported on the increase in complaints of discrimination in the workplace. The article went on to state that, “federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose by 9% last year, the biggest annual increase since the early 1990s.”
Based on the article, one might reasonably conclude that job discrimination has intensified. Another reasonable conclusion might also be that more individuals who suffer discrimination in the workplace have been able to observe, from their experiences, that those who complain of employment discrimination do not suffer the results of reporting employment discrimination to the same extent they did previously.
There is a reasonable likelihood to believe that it is not necessarily the increase in discriminatory conduct that caused the number of individuals who report employment discrimination to be greater than before. Instead it could be that individuals have learned that reporting discriminatory acts does not necessarily produce retaliation. The strong workplace retaliation laws that our lawmakers have enacted throughout our country have, in large part, effectively protected those who report discrimination from the retaliatory conduct they feared in the past.
