Human resources management overview

Equal opportunity legislation seeks to eliminate the prejudicial hiring practices that were common in the United States prior to this legislation. The initial Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the foundation for the structure of equal opportunity laws, and the structure around which those laws could be enforced. Since that point, several other laws have added to the canon of statutes intended to ensure that most Americans are on equal footing when it comes to hiring and promotions. This paper will go over some of these laws.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The most important equal employment opportunity law was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided that there should not be any discrimination in any element of employment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin or sex. These are to be enforce by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, 2014). This law was the first serious attempt to provide a legal framework to enforce equal employment opportunity. It was quickly adopted throughout the country, and some of its implementation aspects have been refined by the Supreme Court in the intervening years since it was passed.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just the starting point, however, and subsequent laws have refined its tenets. Added to this law under later statutes was the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. People can still be discriminated against for other things under law in many places, except where state laws have built on the anti-discrimination framework.

Another set of laws that came out of the early 1960s began with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, wherein men and women were guaranteed equal pay for equal work. This has proven to be a more challenging law to enforce, having come under multiple challenges in the court system, for example on things like statute of limitations. Subsequent laws have needed to be passed to remedy some of the decisions that have come about. An example is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was signed into law in 2009 following the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2007 that allowed Goodyear to violate the Equal Pay Act of 1963 against Ms. Ledbetter.