The law interacts with the provision of training and development in many different ways. Sometimes it is explicitly mentioned in legislation. Similar to other areas of human resource (HR) management practice, employers need to be concerned about the potential discriminatory effects when selecting who will participate in a specific training or development activity. Even if it is not explicitly mentioned in a piece of legislation, the legal environment impacts the decision of whether an organization should provide employee training.

In most cases, the legal environment encourages organizations to provide their employees with training. The primary way that the law promotes training is by lowering an organization’s potential liability for actions taken by its employees.

Jurisdiction refers to whether or not a specific law applies to your organization. Jurisdiction impacts discrimination in organizations depending on their geography and size. Depending on how many people your organization employs or where it is located, a particular law may or may not apply to you. In terms of organization size, most antidiscrimination laws provide for a threshold number of employees. If your organization’s workforce is under that threshold level, the law does not apply to you.

While it is interesting to note the employee threshold for these laws, most organizations that employ HR professionals in some way meet the minimum. Legally, if a law does not apply to your organization, then you by definition cannot violate it and you cannot be successfully sued for that type of discrimination. Even if you are safe from lawsuits, on an ethical level, there is a recognition that it is not appropriate to discriminate against another person because he or she belongs to a certain group.