Navitas Professional Services is about to offering us staff a multiple discrimination awareness training session for all areas of the organisation. Every person at workplace could possibly be discriminated by their attributes such as age, race, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy or religion and more. Today I'm gonna talk about myselves experience on workplace discrimination.
I have been discriminated before at my previous workplace, which is located in Marget, Tas. In that factory, all the full times job position are occupied by local citizen. All other staffs, who is from different countries other than Australia are having casual position in factory. The factory manager would always let casual staff go home first and leave full time staff stay at factory and continue to work. One day, we heard that after we casual staffs left, the factory manager turned the machine speed slower for full time staff. We get very angry because how long did you work means exactly how much money you are going to get. We have same hourly salary rate, but casual working in higher speed and work harder and full time working in slower speed.
The way how the factory treated full time position and casual position differently seems like workplace discrimination for all casual staff. I was very disappointed and angry at that time. But I didn't really do anything about this to stop it. What I did is that I quit the job. It was a solution for me, but not for casual staffs who still work in that factory. I was ignoring the discrimination by walking away instead of stopping it entirely.
If I were facing discrimination at workplace again, I would report it to Fairwork, Australian government and headquarters of factory to stop it entirely. It is important to let the factory manager know that what he did is a workplace discrimination, and it is wrong.
Above is my own experience in dealing with workplace discrimination. If you are facing it, report it and let other people know. Solve the problem instead of running away from it.
