The business industry has been marked by an increasingly rising number of litigation cases in the recent years, employment issues being the most common ones. Perhaps this increased trend of employees suing their employing companies for discriminatory acts has come into play due to the growth in the number of laws protecting group rights particularly after various movements that characterized the twentieth century. Employee discrimination against women has been targeted after the civil rights Act of 1964 when the female gender was added to the list of the protected people. Moreover laws such as Title I of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) passed in 1990 protects further employee discrimination against even the disabled sects of the working population. One questions what exactly is categorized as employee discrimination then, since the horizons have considerably been stretched over many years.
In simple words Employee discrimination includes any sort of biased behaviour of the employer in the workplace owing to any particular trait of the worker such as their ethnicity, gender, dialect, race, etc. Usually this involves a certain amount of harassment at work. Discrimination in employment plays out in the job hiring processes, designation of tasks, firing, promotion, substitution and even the pension details. We know that employee discrimination is a mass spread phenomenon when we look at the popularity of occupational differentials in today’s world. This employee discrimination may involve the use of intention as in the case of ‘disparate treatment’ or the use of unintended discrimination by creating a ‘disparate impact’ for the employees.
I will attempt to highlight how one of the leading oil companies of the states, Texaco, countered and came out of a law suit it faced regarding discrimination in employment which made the headlines in late 1996’s. Texaco, which was founded as one of the country’s leading oil retail companies in 1901, faced the worst law suit case in the business history in 1996 when it was forced to agree to pay over $170 million in order to settle the blatant racial discrimination claims made in lawsuits that were filed by black employees. The lawsuit impacted Texaco’s public image drastically and resulted in it losing face in the media as well. The case was finally lost by Texaco when one of the company employees leaked out tapes from the high-level corporate meetings in which racial and ethnic insults were used by commanding officials and their plans of destroying documented evidences were being discussed. I am using Texaco’s case as an example of discrimination in employment because it was highly popular at the time as well as the fact that the means that the company used to come out of the lawsuit are applaud able and resulted in Texaco changing its corporate management policy to a great deal to encourage diversity and ethnic acceptance which can applied to most of the general businesses as a policy example.
The lawsuit was filed in June 1994 initially by six black Texaco employees who claimed that they had been discriminated against in the workplace. They claimed to represent more than 1400 employees who were African American like them and worked in Texaco. They said that the proceedings had been going on for more than three years commencing from 1991. In August 1994 the case was complicated when one of the older white company workers who turned over the tapes of the company executives to the plaintiff’s counsel discussing how they would respond to the plaintiff’s requests. The tapes found their way to New York Times where the exact conversations were printed and the ethnic insults were also specifically highlighted. Terms such as ‘black jelly beans’ and ‘niggers’ were specially seen as derogatory. The tapes also weakened the case for the Texaco company as they showed the executives discussing how they would do away with crucial evidence against their case. In November 1996 the lawyers of the plaintiffs used the transcripts in the tapes especially by the ex-treasurer Robert Ulrich. In response Texaco took away the retirement benefits from him as well as suspending the two other executives shown in the tapes. On November 12 in the same year the famous American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson issued a statement that asked for the provision of rights to these black workers otherwise a boycott would be conducted against the company. Finally after dragging the case for two and a half years on November the fifteenth 1996 Texaco agreed to hand over pay $176.1 million to resolve the discrimination suit. Texaco was supposed to raise the salary of all black employees which would lead to a total of $4 million starting from effective the first of January 1997. Apart from this hourly workers were not included in the settlement payments.
Laws should exist which reduce the disparity from the beginning such as race anonymity in applications for the company as well as not allowing biased members to sit in the interviewing panel. The corporate culture was reversed in the sense that a task force was commenced which was given the highest authority in Human resource management by determining the fairness policies of Texaco. This task force would have three members chosen by the plaintiffs, three by Texaco and one chairman co decided by both. The task force was sworn in June 1997 settling the case finally and proving to be an example for all companies to not indulge in employment discrimination.
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