Real Facts about Discrimination and Harassment on Overweight Persons

[Carol]

Many surveys show the fact that employers, whether we talk about small or big companies, are mostly interested in hiring 'normal' weight people. Over the years, the surveys indicate a decrease regarding the job offers for overweight persons. These are discouraged even to apply for any jobs and it is a controversial issue whether they can legally do something about these situations.

Of course, as discrimination and harassment are important factors for so many decades now, the legislation defend the victims, but these have to know how and where to ask for help. As an example, any employee discriminated or harassed can complaint to the Employment Tribunal. There are countries where there are no laws protecting overweight persons, while the other categories of persons, being, as well, a subject of discrimination and implicit of harassment, as race, sex, religion and orientation, are fully protected.

As far as I know, only US laws, and here I talk about only Washington-DC, Madison-WI, Urbana-IL, Santa Cruz and San Francisco-CA and Binghamton-NY, have specific elements helping all those encountering weight or height issues. Anyway, in all those other countries, people can get protection on some other base, as civil rights.

For sure, knowing your rights is going to help you to protect yourself against all those discriminating you. Usually, discrimination and harassment in the work environment is an important issue and it is taken seriously. Discrimination in a work place, going hand in hand with harassment, takes different forms, accordingly to the subject, as gender, sex, color, nationality or age. To these ones, we can easily add overweight persons. These kinds of discrimination cases are more numerous than before, and, after the racial factor, is the second reason of someone discriminating others.

Only in the US, 45 percent of women and 28 percent of men, announce that they had encountered problems because of their weight. These are the ones reporting the issues; we are not going to know the real number, as not all of them are reporting the problem. All these persons were not given promotions, were fired, or not hired because of being overweight. Even more, they were as well insulted, abused, or harassed by many of their colleagues.

As, in most countries are no laws protecting these persons, we, “the others”, should change our attitude and start protecting those suffering from their conditions. Besides our support, we can offer them the information they need, as knowing about the civil rights that protect employees against any discrimination, the rights of persons with disabilities (usually overweight persons have certain rights, as per Disabilities Act of 1990), and the protection rights, which any person, overweighed or not, can have at workplace.

Usually, the discrimination and harassment start when people think that all those suffering from obesity are self-indulgent, unconfident, and lazy, and so, they conclude that these people are not going to be good workers. Except that, the reality is other. They usually work harder, just to compete with all the other employees and prove that they are better.
As well, you, as an overweight person, should know that there are many others discriminated because of who they are or how they look. Today’s society marginalizes gay people, transsexuals, persons with different disabilities, foreign nationalities, and others; all of them are different, not necessarily in a wrong way. Only that, the other persons, let us call them “normal ones”, cannot understand.

In order to stop these discriminations and harassments on overweight persons, we should first come, before laws do it, and defend them. First, we, as society, should be fair and stop discriminating these people. Why we should do this? We should help them because not all these people are able to fight alone against it. They are not going to be taken serious, or even worst, they are going to be offended and hurt again.

This is why, we, the average-sized persons, are able to help them, as our opinion counts, as “our” opinion is the one blaming them. We should be and teach others to be more tolerating; when we see an act of discrimination or harassment we should interfere and never let people’s size to be a stereotype. Our society stereotype should be wisdom, goodness, cleverness and other real values, defining who we really are.