Equality Act was enacted on 1st of October, 2010 by the government of the UK. This Act covers over 116 different legislations for providing a comprehensive legal framework to safeguard the individual’s rights and provide equal opportunity to everyone. This single Act ensures equal employment accessibility to public and private services, without differentiating the individuals on the basis of protected characteristics such as age, gender, physical or mental disability, marriage or civil partnership, religion, race, maternity or pregnancy and sexual orientation (The Equality Act 2010:Employment implications for the NHS, 2010). This act was brought to ensure consistency in different ways employers and employees are required to create a fair and
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Few changes are made from the previous discrimination legislations along with adding new points in the revised and more comprehensive framework. These changes are still continuing, for instance law on discrimination against marriage or partnership status and age was included in equality law framework in 2012. Two major changes are related to the claiming procedure followed if an employee feels harassed due to his age, race, disability, sexual orientation and gender; or victimised against each and every protected characteristics (The Equality Act – What’s new for employers?, 2011). Earlier employees were not allowed to complain if the offensive behaviour was targeted to someone else; under the new act they have got the right to complain even if the victim is someone else. Major additions in the existing framework can be discussed as …show more content…
Dual discrimination is rightly added in the list but multiple discriminations should also be allowed to report while streamlining and making the act more comprehensive. This can be assumed that there must be cases of employees who have been discriminated unlawfully on multiple grounds simultaneously (Robinson, n.d.). An employee might be negatively discriminated for being a female or for being a Black Muslim female. Although gender, religious belief and color are separate protected categories and an employee is free to complain for dual discrimination and additional complain for discrimination against other protected category, but this creates a serious issue because there are supposed to be different comparators for the individual claims (The Equality Act: Issues for Employers,
Few changes are made from the previous discrimination legislations along with adding new points in the revised and more comprehensive framework. These changes are still continuing, for instance law on discrimination against marriage or partnership status and age was included in equality law framework in 2012. Two major changes are related to the claiming procedure followed if an employee feels harassed due to his age, race, disability, sexual orientation and gender; or victimised against each and every protected characteristics (The Equality Act – What’s new for employers?, 2011). Earlier employees were not allowed to complain if the offensive behaviour was targeted to someone else; under the new act they have got the right to complain even if the victim is someone else. Major additions in the existing framework can be discussed as …show more content…
Dual discrimination is rightly added in the list but multiple discriminations should also be allowed to report while streamlining and making the act more comprehensive. This can be assumed that there must be cases of employees who have been discriminated unlawfully on multiple grounds simultaneously (Robinson, n.d.). An employee might be negatively discriminated for being a female or for being a Black Muslim female. Although gender, religious belief and color are separate protected categories and an employee is free to complain for dual discrimination and additional complain for discrimination against other protected category, but this creates a serious issue because there are supposed to be different comparators for the individual claims (The Equality Act: Issues for Employers,