Employment Discrimination

Employment discrimination law covers the rules that limit why and how an employer can make decisions about hiring, firing, pay, promotion, and everyday treatment on the job. It exists because certain traits — like race, sex, age, disability, or religion — are considered off-limits as a basis for workplace decisions, even though employers otherwise have wide latitude to run their businesses as they see fit.

What counts as a protected trait is not obvious to most workers, since not every group or characteristic gets special legal treatment. Understanding the difference between a protected class and an ordinary classification helps explain why some unequal treatment is illegal and other unequal treatment, however unfair it feels, is not — a distinction covered in Protected Classes vs. General Classifications: Your Guide to Rights and Fairness.

The core protections that apply across most workplaces, including how they interact with an employer’s general right to hire and fire at will, are laid out in Workplace Discrimination Laws: A Guide to Your Rights and Protections. Age gets its own set of rules once a worker reaches a certain point in their career, a topic explored in Age Discrimination at Work: Your Rights and Legal Protections After 40.

Termination raises its own questions, since most jobs can be ended for almost any reason or none at all — but not for a reason the law forbids. When Getting Fired Is Illegal walks through where that line falls and what recourse a fired worker may have.