..37% said that they had no sympathy for obese people..

Apparently if you are overweight or obese it could affect your chances of being promoted at work and you are also more likely to be made redundant by your employer! A new survey that was released shows that over 90% of all UK Human Resources managers said that they would prefer to give a job to a slim person than to an overweight or obese person. The said that if they had to evenly matched people for a job that they would favour the slim person and reject the fat one purely for being overweight.

The Human Resource managers were also asked about other aspects of obesity and nearly one third said that they reckoned that obesity was a “valid medical reason” for not giving a person a job and 37% said that they had no sympathy for obese people and therefore didn’t believe that they had a right to be favoured or helped in anyway. Many Human Resource managers were of the opinion that obese and overweight people were detrimental to a company’s image and with so much emphasis on corporate image these days a good and slim appearance was vital.

At present the law is very clear about discrimination in the workplace and its is illegal to not employ people based on gender, racial aspects, sexual orientation, disability and even age but obesity is not listed. Some obese people may claim that their obesity is a disability but this has not been tested at law and obese people are also not listed in the Disability Discrimination Act which designed to help disabled people in the workplace. In theory what this actually means is that you could sack someone in your office simply for being overweight and you’d have to give no other reason.

The survey that was carried out by The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust (TOAST) was released this week for the National Obesity Awareness Week. The head of TOAST said that something must be done to stop this “blatant discrimination …..because of their size”.