Implications for Human Resource Development Paper

BSHS/425

DISCRIMINATION AT THE WORKPLACE
I for one have never been discriminated against at my place of employment. Although I have never been personally discriminated against, I have however witnessed a co-worker of mine being discriminated against by another colleague. The girl that was doing the discriminating was young and naïve, she thought she could do or say whatever she wanted without any kind of repercussions. She didn’t care about anyone’s feelings, even if they were her elder or her superior. The way she portrayed herself was that she felt as if she was better than everyone else and was untouchable. During the altercation she had walked up to another one of my colleagues and asked them a question and when they answered her she obviously didn’t like the answer because she used some very derogatory language as well as comment on their race in a not so very nice way. After numerous objections about her behavior and then the report that was made about her discriminating against a co-worker, she was put on probation and had to attend several different sessions on discrimination in the workplace, diversity education, etc. Normally I would say that she should have been terminated, but in this case she really did make an effort to change the way she treated people after attending the sessions and being on probation. She genuinely apologized and turned things around completely. There is a lot more discrimination in the workplace than what people realize, it needs to be brought to the administration’s attention and handled appropriately. Most of the people who do discriminate are not educated on different diversities, they just look at people as being different and they automatically do not want to accept them. If there was more training and education about our diverse population, I feel that there would be