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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe somebody can clarify this for me. It seems that there is a difference in American and European laws about discrimination, where U.S. has a concept of protected groups (i.e. they explicitly enumerate who is not to be discriminated), while EU has laws based on equality of the groups (or more generally, humans).

It seems to me that the American system is more antagonistic, in the sense it really prefers some groups (or classes) to another. And this causes more issues (and more resentment). Am I understanding this right?

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One underlying difference is that the US has at-will employment. Meaning an employer can terminate employee for any reason, except specific no-no reasons.

In the US, it's perfectly legal to fire someone, just cause you think their haircut is stupid, they stole your girlfriend, they root for a sports team you don't like, or you just plain don't like them.

I don't want to over-generalize, because Europe is a collection of many different legal systems, but in general European employees can only be fired for just cause. That is instead of listing why you can't fire someone, they enumerate specific reasons you can terminate an employee.

Therefore to protect against discrimination, the American system requires listing protected classes. The European system does not, because they simply omit "discrimination" from the list of acceptable just causes for termination. However in the US discrimination, i.e. employment termination for reasons unrelated to job performance, is perfectly legal. As long as it doesn't coincide with officially prohibited types of discrimination. Discriminating against employees on the basis of race, sex, or religion is a big problem. Discriminating on the basis of sports fandom, haircut or taste in music is perfectly legal.

> Discriminating on the basis of sports fandom, haircut or taste in music is perfectly legal.

IIUC, correlation of any of those with any of the protected classes will land you in trouble though (and I would guess at least the second two from your list are definitely so correlated).

As a result, again IIUC, all the large companies(+) follow, in practice, a European-style approach: there has to be a well-documented, based on some clearly-non-discriminatory criteria (++), reason for firing you (hence performance-improvement-plans, etc, etc).

[+] large companies == worth suing - again IIUC small companies can basically do what you say

[++] I think that still ends up being easier than firing people in many European countries, though

That makes a lot of sense for termination. How about hiring? Do you know if the European system specifies what attributes are and aren’t allowed to be considered when it comes to hiring employees?

Austrian law has a Gleichbehandlungsgesetz. It forbids negative discrimination because of

- gender,

- age,

- ethnicity,

- world view or religion,

- sexual preference, or

- impairments.

This law applies in most legal matters, including hiring. Some classes, like the physically impaired, have their own laws.

Source: https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/themen/dokumente_und_recht/gle...

EU is a collection of many countries with their unique laws, even if the principles might be similar. I can only speak of Finnish law.

Our constitution simply states that no-one can be treated unequally, without acceptable reason, based on race, sex etc etc or any other trait related to the person itself.

So caste discrimination would be illegal here as it is a reason based on the person. The loophole of ”Acceptable reason” there is mostly to allow them to put only people with testicles in mandatory military service without it going against constitution.

Can you explain the EU law? If a man applied to be a girl's PE teacher that would be in a locker room, is that allowed? Certainly not, right? The US allows discrimination in general as long as it's not based on membership in certain groups, unless such membership is germaine to the job. So you could limit gender in my PE teacher example, but you can't for a crossing guard (because presumably, anyone can be a crossing guard but sex matters for PE teaching).

Used PE teaching because I can't think of a better example.

Why would any PE teacher enter the locker room, that seems odd regardless of gender.

That was my attempt at a good example. Certainly you must admit there are occupations where gender matters? Like prison guard?

A better example would be casting for a film. You can definitely cast only Aryan men for a Nazi role. That would be reasonable and the law permits that. Generally speaking cases of discrimination are settled in court and judges have the latitude to, well, judge.

You can read the US law yourself:

https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...

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