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practices of employers.
    Similarly, the civil rights movement and the women’s movement led to legislation that protected employees against discriminatory practices. Beginning with laws protecting employees against racial discrimination, the umbrella of protective legislation has expanded to cover religious and ethnic minorities, women, older Americans, homosexuals, and the disabled. (See the box on page 34: How Protected Are You?)
    HOW PROTECTED ARE YOU?
There are a number of different federal, state, and local laws that protect people against discrimination in the workplace. How protected you are depends on a great number of factors, including your age, ethnic background, health, and where you live.
Everyone in the United States is potentially protected by federal legislation. There’s Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits job bias on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, and national origin. Then there’s the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which prohibits job bias against individuals forty years of age and over. There’s also the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits job bias against individuals with disabilities who work for employers with fifteen or more employees. Finally, there’s Section 510 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which prohibits discrimination against an individual in connection with his or her entitlement to pension benefits.
You may have additional protection depending on where you live, since states, and some cities, have their own laws offering workplace protection, often expanding the federal protections dramatically. For example, New York State Human Rights Law prohibits job bias on the basis of age (eighteen and over), race, creed, color, national origin, disability, sex, or marital status. New York City law goes on to prohibit discrimination against someone because of his or her own actual or perceived age, creed, color, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or alienage or citizenship status, as well as the actual or perceived age, creed, color, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or alienage or citizenship status of someone with whom he or she has a known relationship or association. Contact either your state department of labor or your local state legislator’s office to find out what state or city protections you may have. Of course, remember that the best protection you can have is to assume control of your own work life.
    All these noble efforts to redress the imbalance of power in the workplace haven’t really had a major impact. Sure, if you are singled out and terminated because of your race, national origin, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, you can successfully win a legal judgment. However, you can be a blind sixty-year-old African American lesbian bookkeeper from France, and if you’re just one of a hundred other people let go because the company decided to outsource all the back-office functions, you don’t have a case. And don’t expect much solidarity either.
    The American labor movement’s rise to power was tied to the rise of manufacturing as the driving force in the American economy. As manufacturing has declined, so has the strength of the labor movement. With a few notable exceptions (teachers, professional athletes), the labor movement hasn’t been able to successfully organize information or service-industry workers. No one has been able to convince the twenty - four - year - old single mother working at a day-care center, the thirty-five-year-old college graduate writing code for a software company, and the forty-five-year-old account executive at an advertising agency that they have any common cause with the auto worker, or with each other, for that matter. We’ve become a nation of rugged individualist workers and “intrapreneurs.” That’s been great for corporate productivity and profitability but, as it turns out, not so great for individual security and