Serving Up The Truth About Sexual Harassment, With A Side of Commonsense
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
By Nikki Lewis, Executive Director, DC
Jobs with Justice and Liz Watson, Senior
Counsel and Director of Workplace Justice for
Women, National Women’s Law
Center
What do you
call the person who can make you stay late at
work, who decides who works the night shift and
who works days, who works the cash register and
who cleans the toilets? You call that person
the boss. But exactly one year ago today, the
Supreme Court said that if the person who
directs your daily work harasses you, unless
they also have the power to hire and fire you,
the strong protections that are supposed to
kick in when bosses harass their subordinates
do not apply.
Right
about now, you might be scratching your head
thinking that this doesn’t make any sense.
And you would be right. Here’s how we ended
up with this terrible rule and what can be done
about it.
More than 15
years ago, recognizing the potential for bosses
to abuse their power over their subordinates
and that employers should be responsible for
preventing this abuse, the Supreme Court put in
place strong legal protections from this
harassment. Then last year, a narrow 5-4
decision in Vance v. Ball State University
undercut those protections by saying they only
apply to harassment by bosses who also have the
power to take actions like hiring or firing.
The Vance decision held that the person who tells you when to show up at work and what to do when you get there is just another coworker. This means that claims of harassment by the person who directs your daily work but can’t hire and fire you are evaluated under the much tougher legal standard that applies to claims of coworker harassment. As a result, it is now much harder for workers harassed by those who direct their daily work to have their day in court.
The Vance decision held that the person who tells you when to show up at work and what to do when you get there is just another coworker. This means that claims of harassment by the person who directs your daily work but can’t hire and fire you are evaluated under the much tougher legal standard that applies to claims of coworker harassment. As a result, it is now much harder for workers harassed by those who direct their daily work to have their day in court.
Nikki
knows firsthand what harassment by a boss who
directs your daily work feels like. As a
teenager she worked in a restaurant where she
reported to an assistant manager who harassed
her and many of the other teenage girls on the
job. He dry-humped her coworker’s leg,
stared at Nikki while licking his lips, and
posted lists of who had the “best” breasts
and butts. He repeatedly bugged Nikki to
meet up with him after work to drink and party,
and told her that he loved her. When Nikki
rejected his advances, he retaliated by
routinely assigning extra tasks that required
her to stay late and making sure he was nowhere
to be found when it was time for him to sign
her time slip so that she could clock out.
Nikki’s assistant manager had plenty of power
over the workers who reported to him.
Although he didn’t have the power to
hire and fire them, he could make their lives
harder by giving them worse schedules,
assigning them worse sections of the
restaurant, and making them stay late to do
extra work.
But the
Vance decision leaves workers who report to
bosses like Nikki’s – who direct their
daily work but do not have the power to hire
and fire – with watered down protections from
harassment. The Supreme Court’s rollback of
harassment protections is especially
devastating to workers in the restaurant
industry. A study reported that between January
and November 2011 alone, almost 37 percent of
all the charges of sexual harassment
made
by women to the federal Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission came from the
restaurant
industry.
By one
estimate, approximately a quarter of workers
get their start in the restaurant industry. We
both did. And in many of the restaurants where
we worked, harassment was just an accepted part
of the workplace culture. But when workers
start out exposed to harassment on the job, it
can influence what they think they have to put
up with at work for a very long time. And
restaurants are just one of many work
environments in which harassment is still
commonplace. One quarter of women and ten
percent of men overall report having
experienced
harassment.
As a new
report out earlier this year from the National
Women’s Law Center shows, in our nation’s
workplaces there are more than six million
lower-level supervisors – bosses who direct
employees' daily work but who do not have the
power to hire and fire. And more than half of
them are overseeing low-wage workers.
Workers need strong protections from the
potential abuse of power by these
bosses.
Fortunately
there is a commonsense solution. The Fair
Employment Protection Act – introduced in
Congress this past March – would make clear
that the protections against harassment by a
superior extend to harassment both by bosses
who have the power to take actions like hiring
and firing and those who have the authority to
direct daily
work.
When workers who
have experienced harassment on the job come
forward to report it, they are putting their
jobs on the line. Those who do take that brave
step deserve to have the law on their
side.
photo: Lewis (right) and Watson
photo: Lewis (right) and Watson