publications

Non-Discrimination

Dalit women honor the late Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who spent his life fighting “untouchability” and other forms of caste discrimination. © 2006 Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images

All human beings are entitled to fair and equal treatment and freedom from discrimination.56 The prohibition against discrimination applies in respect of all rights. It encompasses discrimination on the basis of gender, race, nationality, or other status.

Nondiscrimination in the workplace is enshrined as a core labor right (as addressed further below).57 Businesses can also engage in harmful discrimination in other contexts as well, such as by arbitrarily refusing service to particular categories of customers.

Illustrations of improper discrimination include, among others:

  • A state-owned gold company in DRC has favored workers from one ethnic group over another in compensation and promotions.58
  • Employers in the Dominican Republic have blatantly discriminated against workers based on their actual or perceived HIV status.59
  • Saudi employers, consistent with prevailing gender segregation, have forcibly confined many low-paid women migrant workers, including those who work in hospitals and dress shops.60 The mistreatment in Saudi Arabia of migrant workers from Asia and Africa also has been aggravated by deeply rooted religious and racial discrimination.61
  • A variety of businesses—and particularly bars, pubs, and clubs—in several southern African countries have openly discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. These discriminatory practices also have helped create a climate of intimidation that has contributed to violence, in which staff and other patrons in these establishments have assaulted lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender (LGBT) individuals.62
  • Wal-Mart has been accused of illegal sex and disability discrimination in the United States, and its efforts to squeeze out long-term employees who command higher wages have had a disparate impact on older employees.63
  • Companies in Guatemala’s export assembly or “maquila” industry have engaged in persistent sex discrimination and abuse against women workers.64
  • In the same industry in Mexico, employers have routinely forced female job applicants to undergo pregnancy screening, usually through urine tests, as a precondition for employment.65
  • Employers in Guatemala and Mexico’s export processing plants also have fired women workers or forced them to resign if they became pregnant. In addition to being discriminatory on the basis of gender, such acts are also contrary to provisions of international human rights law that afford additional protections to pregnant women.66

Two additional examples are summarized in more detail below.

Women’s Work: Discrimination against Women in the Ukrainian Labor Force67

Widespread employment discrimination against women in Ukraine inhibits women’s access to jobs, including many stable and well-compensated positions, and limits women’s choices as to where they can seek work. Employers in both the public and private sectors regularly specify gender requirements when advertising vacancies and use information regarding family circumstances to deny women employment.

Employers justify their preferences for male employees on stereotypical assumptions about women’s physical and intellectual capacities and their family responsibilities. As a result, women are increasingly pushed into low-wage service sector or public sector jobs or seek employment in the unregulated informal sector. Age and appearance requirements also arbitrarily exclude women from jobs for which they are professionally qualified.

Given limited employment options in Ukraine, many women choose to go abroad to seek better economic opportunities, but their choice may leave them vulnerable to being trafficked into the commercial sex industry or other forms of forced labor. While these various discriminatory practices violate both international and Ukrainian domestic laws, government officials have done little to uphold the rights of women in the Ukrainian labor force. In a 2003 report on the problem, Human Rights Watch found that Ukrainian employers demonstrated little knowledge of basic Ukrainian law as well as an unwillingness to apply laws that they knew to exist.

Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination Against India’s “Untouchables”68

India is home to 165 million Dalits, or so-called untouchables, who are relegated to the bottom of a rigid caste system and subjected to extreme social stigma. In all aspects of their lives, Dalits are physically segregated from non-Dalits because of their “untouchable” status. Despite constitutional protections and legislative prohibitions that nominally protect them, Dalits suffer discrimination on the basis of work and descent. Rreporting by CHRGJ and Human Rights Watch has helped reveal the ways that businesses in India perpetuate this form of “hidden apartheid.” Businesses reinforce the unfair treatment accorded Dalits both through biased service provision and by severely restricting Dalits’ job opportunities in accordance with the prevailing caste hierarchy.

Throughout India many businesses refuse Dalits access to their services or facilities. One 2007 study illustrated the widespread nature of such discriminatory practices: it revealed that Dalits are often not allowed to sell milk to cooperatives, are denied barber, laundry, tailoring, and carpentry services, and are refused entry to restaurants and hotels, private health clinics, and cinemas, all on the basis of their caste. In one-fifth of the villages surveyed, shops forbid Dalits from touching anything during transactions. 

Caste-based discrimination also helps fuel exploitation of labor at the hands of both private and public employers, including businesses. Dalits are routinely forced into dangerous and degrading work, often for little or no pay. In keeping with the practice of caste inequality, employers routinely deny free choice of employment and instead strictly assign labor on the basis of caste, assigning Dalits to jobs considered too “polluting” for others. Most notably, an estimated 1.3 millions Dalits in India work for both public and private employers as manual scavengers, a position so degrading that it has been officially outlawed. The workers in these posts endure dangerous and humiliating work, including manually collecting human waste, often without the benefit of protective gear.

Many Dalits, including children, are consigned to work as bonded laborers, while tens of millions of Dalits find work as landless agricultural laborers earning less than US$1 a day. Upper-caste landowners frequently use caste as a cover for exploitative economic arrangements. Laws designed to prohibit and eradicate exploitative labor arrangements, untouchability practices, and other forms of caste-based abuse are openly flouted and seldom enforced, reflecting continuing social prejudice. Attempts by Dalits to demand their rights, including their labor rights, are routinely met with retaliatory violence and economic boycotts, often taking the form of collective punishment of entire Dalit communities for the perceived transgressions of a few.




56 Prohibitions on discrimination are reflected, for example, in UDHR, art. 2, ICESCR, art. 2, ICCPR, art. 2, and CRC, art. 2. See also ICERD, CEDAW, CMW, and CPD; International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 100 concerning Equal Remuneration for Men and Women Workers for Work of Equal Value, adopted June 29, 1951, 165 U.N.T.S. 303, entered into force May 23, 1953, and ILO Convention No. 111 concerning Discrimination, Employment and Occupation, adopted July 5, 1958, 362 U.N.T.S. 31, entered into force June 15, 1960.

57 See below, “Labor,” for additional explanation.

58 Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold, p. 78.

59 Human Rights Watch, A Test of Inequality, pp. 17-28.

60 Human Rights Watch, Bad Dreams, pp. 3, 18, 47-55, 69-71.

61 Human Rights Watch, Bad Dreams, pp. 1, 15-16, 55, 70-71.

62 Human Rights Watch and IGLHRC, More Than A Name, pp. 2-4, 150-159.

63 Human Rights Watch, Discounting Rights, see especially, pp. 9, 35-36, 39-41, 55-57.

64 Human Rights Watch, From the Household to the Factory, pp. 49-50, 53-56, 84-102, 106-108. See also, for example, “Stop Sex Discrimination in Guatemalan Maquilas: What is Discrimination on the Basis of Reproductive Status?” Human Rights Watch questions and answers, undated, http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/guatemala/reproductive_status.htm; “Q&A about Pregnancy Discrimination in Mexico: How Does Pregnancy Discrimination Occur?” Human Rights Watch questions and answers, August 1996, http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/wrp-mexico/ans3.html.

65 Human Rights Watch, No Guarantees, pp. 4, 16-32; Human Rights Watch, A Job or Your Rights, pp. 3, 14-23, 26-35, 50-51.

66 Human Rights Watch, No Guarantees, pp. 4, 25-29; Human Rights Watch, A Job or Your Rights, pp. 3, 26-35, 50-51.

67 Human Rights Watch, Women’s Work, pp. 18-37. 

68 CHRGJ and Human Rights Watch, Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s “Untouchables,” vol. 19, no. 3(C), February 2007, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/india0207/india0207web.pdf, pp. 2, 14, 45-46, 81-90, 100, 113; see also, Human Rights Watch, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables,” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india, pp. 1-14, 209-228; Human Rights Watch, The Small Hands of Slavery, pp. 41-44.