genou wrote:It's not engineering social change. Society has changed. The legislation is to force the laggards to keep up.
Well that's one way of looking at it. However, in my experience many of the "changes" are fairly superficial. In many cases all the legislation has really achieved is to suppress people from expressing their true feelings, at least in public. Legislation can't make a bigoted person into a decent person.
But scrape the veneer away and there is still a huge amount of what you would probably call prejudice. I would argue that much of it is just common sense.
Let's imagine that a one man band wants to take on his first employee and he is given the choice of a woman of 28 and a man of 28, both of whom are recently married (though not to each other!) Let's also make the unlikely assumption that they are both perfect for the job so that there is nothing to choose between them.
But it''s bound to occur to the employer that the woman may well have a child within a couple of years. This will at the very least mean that he will have to deal with maternity leave, and quite possibly the permanent loss of her as an employee.
Of course, the man's wife may also have a child, but that's unlikely to impact on his employment to anything like the same extent.
A rational person would therefore choose to employ the man. This isn't prejudice, it's just common sense based on the reality of life. It would be exactly the same choice as if the choice was between two identical robots, one of which had a significant risk of being out of action for a few months, possibly permanently.
Legally if he chooses to employ the man he is probably guilty of sex discrimination and could be heavily penalised, but I'm struggling to see that he has done anything that's `morally' wrong.
Exactly the same would apply if he was faced with a healthy female employee and a man with a track record of depression and anxiety. The common sense decision would be to employ the healthy woman, but that would also be a discriminatory act.
As I said before, small businesses should not be expected to act as an extension of the welfare state. They employ people for a purpose - to help the business succeed - and not to make a point or send a message to the community at large. They should therefore be free from such constraints when choosing who to employ.
I know that there are any number of cases where the decision may turn out to have been completely unjustified, and where making the `irrational' choice would have been the right one, but realistically these cases are likely to be in the minority.
Of course a larger organisation can afford to take risks far more readily, and in the first scenario they would be much more likely to offer the woman a job as if she were to have a child they would have the resources to deal with her absence in a way that could be of benefit to both of them. Consequently, the `risk' of that happening would be outweighed by the benefit of having a high quality employee.
And, of course, the larger the organisation (and always if publicly funded) the more they are concerned about their image - their "corporate social responsibility" - so whatever the people who run it may privately think they will in public want to be seen to embrace all the policies promoted as being progressive.
The costs of all this are expected to be shared amongst us all. If a small business is too poorly run, or too economically marginal, to be able to deal with that in its pricing, then we have collectively decided that it should not be there in preference to it surviving by discriminating.
I suspect you've never run a small business. Many small businesses are `economically marginal', but they nevertheless provide an excellent service to their customers, and they also provide employment for millions of people. In many cases they don't make economic sense at all, and I've seen plenty where the employees are better off than their employer. The employer continues to operate because they love what they do, and will continue to do so even if they are only just breaking even.
But to make the lofty statement that if they can't afford to comply to the letter with legislation, no matter how unfair it may be to such businesses, they should just go to the wall is a point of view with which I fundamentally disagree.
On the "less than ideal" ; Jesus CK, please retract that.
Certainly not! The `ideal' employee is chosen
solely on merit. If external factors like compliance with discrimination law persuade the employer to choose someone different then that person is by definition `less than ideal'.
