Discrimination Against Vulnerable Personnel in the Workplace

The paper aims to address the dimensions of discrimination faced in the labor market, from the perspective of the employment process and workplace discrimination by some categories of vulnerable staff, as defined in the reports of the European Union, and the reports of the Romanian institutes, bodies and NGOs. The literature focuses mainly on vulnerable groups, frames, and situations of discrimination, types of vulnerabilities or methods by which these people are discriminated against, and too little on the coping mechanisms that they use. The research method was a questionnaire survey using a quantitative methodology. It consists of several sections and was administered to a sample of 66 respondents, aged over 18 years. The research questions aim to reveal the discriminations that occur and how these manifest. After the application of the questionnaire, the data was interpreted by the authors and it emerged that the discrimination manifests in various ways from the early stages of the employment process until the conclusion of the individual employment contract. The aim was to quantify and expose harmful practices of the employers that promote practices that are considered unethical, illegal, or discriminatory, in some cases, and that have repercussions on the individual, on the company in which they work, by affecting the working environment, creating internal tensions and creating a toxic organizational culture leading to a negative financial impact.