Legal Issues in Human Relations

Legal Issues in Human Relations

A good human relations officer has to have skills far beyond being able to help find good candidates to fill any openings at his or her company. She must also be able to help guide managers and others who have hiring and firing capacities to abide by all laws that apply to them. This can sometimes be a complex role for the human relations officer, for the people who have the responsibility to hire, promote, and fire workers rarely have significant training in human relations and may well not have up-to-date information on their legal obligations. This paper examines some of the legal restrictions that human relations officers are responsible for helping their company to understand and comply with.

Sometimes the laws that govern human relations decisions are counterintuitive. Consider, for example, the following exchange in the middle of a job interview:

Manager: I see that you have listed on your resume a great deal of charity work for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. I find that very admirable, that level of commitment. Does it come from personal experience with the disease?

This might seem to be a perfectly natural and even laudable comment, demonstrating that the manager has taken the time to read the interviewee's background, is being supportive of an individual's commitment to improving her community, and is expressing concern for the possibility that she may have a chronic and terrible disease.

However, while the above assessments are certainly true, no manager should in fact travel down this path because it might well bring the company into a legal conflict with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA requires that businesses make reasonable accommodations for individuals with recognized disabilities, of which Type I diabetes (which is the term now used for Juvenile Diabetes) is such a recognized disability. If this candidate were to be denied the job, then she might well bring a suit against the company on the grounds that she had been denied employment because of her medical condition.

This might or might not have had anything to do with her not receiving the job; indeed it is entirely possible that her condition had nothing at all to do with her being passed over for the job. However, by having introduced the topic into the interview, the manager has allowed the company to become potentially vulnerable to suffering financial losses and loss of status (Jolls & Prescott, n.d.).

In general, human relations personnel should train managers not to elicit personal details from subjects being interviewed since such private details are not relevant to a job in most cases. This is something that it may be difficult for managers to understand since quite often -- indeed, probably most of the time -- managers bring up such personal details out of a genuine, friendly interest in others as well as in an attempt to put the candidate at ease.

It is true, however, that in some cases it is permissible for hiring managers to ask personal questions. Another hypothetical example may be helpful here. Let us return for a moment to the case above. After the manager in the example cited praises the candidate for her volunteer work, he then adds that he hopes that she is not in favor of stem-cell research since it is a violation of his Catholic beliefs. He then asks her if she too is Catholic.

If the workplace is not specifically and explicitly religiously affiliated, then the manager has once again made a serious mistake and opened the company up to possible legal action. A person's religion is in almost all employment contexts an entirely private issue and asking a job candidate about her religion suggests that that religious affiliation is one of the criteria on which she is being assessed. Again, even if this is in fact not the case, the manager has opened up the process to the suggestion of religious bias.

If, however, the person conducting the interview is the director of a religious school, then he does have the right to inquire about the candidate's religious affiliation and beliefs. A teacher at a religious school must be able -- arguably -- to be able to instruct students in religious tenets (even if her formal position is as a math teacher, for example) and to serve as a model for the religion's tenets. However, unless religious beliefs and practices are central to the carrying-out of a job, a job interviewer may not legitimately bring them up (Religious groups push for faith-based hiring.)

Another area in which a manager might fail to support the laws that govern hiring and so be in need of gentle guidance of the professional acumen of human relations officer is that of race. Both federal and state laws prohibit bias in hiring on the basis of race or ethnicity: It is simply and absolutely forbidden to deny the best qualified person the job simply because that person is of a different race than the interviewer -- or even the same race. Race can never be a legitimate criterion in rejecting the best candidate.

Let us return to our example, assuming once again that the manager is well-intentioned but clueless and had been napping through all of the excellent human relations seminars that that office has been putting on. So in this case the manager opens the interview as follows: