Unfortunately, discrimination is everywhere you go nowadays and it just seems to be getting worse every day. Employment discrimination is unacceptable and due to the nature of the workplace, many more laws still need to be put into place to insure that every citizen is treated fairly and given equal wage opportunity.
However I do have an example of discrimination that happened to a co-worker at my job. We had a new co-worker come in, she was in her twenties and had the type of personality that would say what was on her mind and didn’t care what others thought. Other employees had the impression that she thought she was better than everyone. We have a diverse group of employees at my work that includes, white, black, and Spanish speaking. After many complaints about our new co-worker the management/owners had a meeting with her. They told her that she needed to start making friends with the other teachers and to stay away from the Spanish speaking crowd because they only gossiped and she would never fit in with them. So they basically told her to become acquainted with the lead white teachers. To me the owners were discriminating against the Spanish speakers at my work and doing this behind their back.
Do you feel that discrimination in the workplace violates Kant’s categorical imperative? Why or why not?
I feel that it greatly violatesKent’s categorical. If someone is displaying discrimination in a workplace they should think about if they were in that person’s shoes would they want to be treated or looked at like that. The Kent’s categorical imperative basically means to treat everyone else like you would want to be treated. If you are discriminating someone look at it at their point of view. You wouldn’t want to be treated like that if you were the one being discriminated. You should always treat everyone the same way you would want to be treated no matter what age or race they are.
Some suggestions I would offer to a manager that is trying to prevent discrimination is be strict about it. If someone is showing discrimination against another employee don’t blow it off like it’s something small. Make sure you act on it and stop the discrimination and use disciplinary actions to punish the employee that is causing it. Another thing I would suggest when hiring new employees is to make sure it is well known to new employees that discrimination against other employee is not tolerated and you will terminate employees that do it.
Peat, J. A. (2004). Age discrimination in employment. Retrieved from: https://resources.careered.com/LCMSFileSharePreview/Resources/AdobePDF/age_discrimination_in_employment1P.pdf
