It is important to be comfortable within your workplace and within its surroundings not least because you will be spending most of your life working but it helps give you the motivation to perform your job more effectively.

Each day in the UK people are uncomfortable with their workplace environments because they are suffering from discrimination and do not know what to do.

Direct Discrimination

Direct discrimination refers to an employee being less favourably treated over others because of their their race, marital status, sex, religion, sexual orientation or gender. A direct example could be a female and male candidate going for a job.  The female doesn’t get the interview but the male does despite her being more qualified.

There is also no argument on the part of the employer as the law only considers the result and not the reasons.

Indirect Discrimination

This form of discrimination is less obvious than others it involves a set of requirements, practices or conditions within the workplace imposed by the employer that discriminate again one group or another.
There are a three factors that are taken into account here.

• Firstly that the number of people from a particular group who can meet the job criteria is considerably smaller than the rest.

• The employer can not justify the criteria as being a real requirement of the job.

• The employee’s who cant comply with the employers criteria have suffered in some way.  An employee cant raise a complaint unless in some way they have lost out.

In the case of indirect discrimination, an employer can argue the fact that it is a necessary part of the job.  This is known as (GOR) Genuine occupational requirement.  It doesn’t happen all that often but does play a part in some organisations such as the Chinese restaurant who only wants Chinese staff for obvious reasons.