patrickmacqueen wrote:From a straightforward dis-application of the equality laws for small businesses it would logically follow that it should be legal for a job advertisement to say "no [blacks/women/gays/Muslims/whatever] need apply" - after all, if a small employer has decided that he or she is not going to hire someone in one of these categories, it would be unfair to make a candidate waste their time with a hopeless application.
Have I missed anything, or is that what CK, dspp and quelquod actually support?
It's a fair point, and the short answer is that no, I certainly wouldn't support that proposal. I would find it offensive, as, I hope, would the vast majority of people.
But this whole issue is bedevilled with hypocrisy. In practical terms many employers may as well include the proposed wording in their job advertisements, as they have no intention of employing one or more of the groups mentioned. So as I've said before, all the law does in such situations is to suppress open expression of discrimination. It doesn't change the underlying attitude - in fact in some cases it probably reinforces such attitudes by the very fact of forcibly suppressing them.
And the fundamental question of whether or not such discrimination is `morally' justifiable is highly subjective. I would take the view that the owner of a small business who decides not to employ a young woman because of the risk that she may have a child is behaving reasonably and that he has not transgressed any moral code, whereas if he chose not to employ someone simply because they were black I would consider that to be a result of bigotry rather than for any genuine business reason and that such a decision should be condemned.
However, even though the employer may in that example be morally culpable I still think that their freedom to choose who to employ should outweigh any discrimination issues, so that they should not be subject to legal sanctions. As I said in an earlier post where there are only a handful of employees who by definition all have a close relationship with the employer it's absolutely critical that they all have a good relationship with him, and he should therefore have complete freedom to choose his employees without any constraint.
What we want to achieve is a situation where people are genuinely non-discriminatory, and I do believe that we have been moving in that direction generally over the past few decades. Because younger people have grown up in a much more mixed environment than the average white, middle-class, middle-aged male they are more accepting of difference anyway, without the law having to try and force them into it. Ideally, I would like to see the day when all discrimination law could be repealed, simply because it had become irrelevant.
In the imperfect meantime I accept without reservation anti-discrimination law that punishes `hate crimes'. I also accept that it's reasonable to apply anti-discrimination employment laws to larger companies and organisations so as to enable some positive discrimination in favour of disadvantaged minorities as a matter of social policy. But such legislation is counter-productive in the case of small businesses, benefiting neither employer nor employee, and they should not be subjected to it.
Where and how the line should be drawn is a difficult question, but fortunately not one that I have to answer!
