Case Study on Human Rights in a Workplace

This is a provincial act as most employees, managers and even owner of the gas station violate the prohibited grounds section. They violate this act because they are racist towards Simon which is direct discrimination because he even says that they would call him names and look at him while talking about racist comments which is direct because they are clearly directing it to him and they know he knows, and the owner didn’t want to hire him because of his ethnicity which it didn’t say in the study but what it did say is the owner didn’t want to hire him until he had to beg which doesn’t really violate any code because there is no proof that that is the reason but he does show a lot of racism when Simon got to know him better meaning he didn’t want to hire him because he was black and he thought black people where the reason crime rate was going up in the community. They also broke another act mainly the shift manager and this is the Ontario health and safety act and they violated the right to know, as every worker has the right to know which means they have the right to training, which Simon did not get he just got a quick overview.

The owner did not have a justifiable reason to fire Simon because the owner’s complaint to fire Simon would say something like he isn’t working hard enough and doesn’t know how to use the equipment, but this is not okay and not a good enough reason as Simon was not given training for the equipment and machinery and he has a right to know. So, if he wasn’t given the training and if they violated his rights they should not be firing him if it even was him. Another reason why they cannot really fire him because of this is because they have no proof it was him because when he was using it, it was working fine, the blame should not immediately go on him and I think discrimination and racism plays a big role in him getting fired. If on the other hand they didn’t show any signs of discrimination and racism and had proof that Simon broke the machine and provided training, then they could have written him up and give him a warning.

Some additional factors that would be taken into consideration by the Canadian human rights commission can include: they will take in the strategic implications of legal challenges, the reason to why I say this is because it says you need proof of a jurisdiction to fire someone, and also that everyone is trained equally which is this case he was barely trained at all and only provided him with a quick verbal description, and they also didn’t have proof that he had broke the machine. Another factor that will consider looking into is prohibited grounds and under racism because as Simon says they talk about a lot of racist stuff and they look at him while they are saying it and even if they don’t look at him if you say blacks are the reason for a increase of crime rate in the community you are targeting all blacks and that includes you employees (Simon) which should not happen and is not legal. One of the last factors they might investigate is direct discrimination because in the interview the owner was kind of being racist and judging Simon on his ethical appearance and did not want to hire him because of it until Simon convinced him to give him a chance. Even though he gave him a chance what he did still falls under direct discrimination because he didn’t want to hire him because he was black because he meets all the requirements for the job, so he didn’t want to hire him because he is black.

Due to the coworkers/managers and owners behaviour they create a very poisoned and racist work environment. The reason why it is a poisoned work environment is because the shift managers and the co-workers show discrimination and violate racism under prohibited grounds which they direct at him by looking at him this shows that this workplace lacks employment equity (Schwind) as it seems when Simon talked to the owner he showed a bit of discrimination by being hesitant for hiring Simon, this is lack of employment equity because you can tell they try to avoid hiring people with different skin color.

Another reason to why this is a poisoned environment is because they are firing Simon without a real reason with proof because the other worker was working while the system overheated, meaning Simon technically couldn’t have done it because he was not working while it broke meaning the worker after should have been aware the machine was used and he should have let it cool down even a little.

The last reason to why this is a poisoned work environment is because as you can tell they don’t train there new workers and don’t educate them on the machines that they are using so the workers could get hurt and they don’t even know that they are at risk this is very important that all workers especially new are trained in everything including work safety and WHMIS.