What equality law means - Birmingham Disability Resource Centre

1. What equality law means for you as
an employer: managing workers
What's in this guide
If you are an employer, and you are making a decision, or taking action following a
decision, about managing your workers, equality law applies to you.
Equality law applies:
• whatever the size of your organisation
• whatever sector you work in
• whether you have one worker or ten or hundreds or thousands
• whether or not you use any formal processes or forms to help you make decisions or
manage your workers.
This guide tells you how you can avoid all the different types of unlawful discrimination. It
recognises that smaller and larger employers may operate with different levels of formality,
but makes it clear how equality law applies to everyone, and what this means for the way
you (and anyone who already works for you) must do things.
This guide covers the following situations and subjects (we explain what any unusual
words mean as we go along):
• Access to facilities at work
• Dress codes
• Managing and appraising staff
• Disciplining staff
• When a worker becomes a disabled person
• Avoiding and dealing with harassment
This guide also suggests how you can, through equality good practice:
• Avoid and sort out equality-related conflict.
These can broadly be described as management issues that are not covered in the other
guides in this series. All the titles in the series are listed at the beginning of this guide.
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