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Senators are letting themselves off the hook with sexual harassment bill, women’s rights groups say

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Sexual harassment in Congress is a scandal—and it would probably be a lot more of one if Congress hadn’t written its own rules for dealing with allegations in secret. But since the #MeToo movement has shined a light on sexual harassment, the House of Representatives has managed to pass a decent bill. The Senate … hasn’t, and the bill it has coming up for a vote is not the answer. The American Civil Liberties Union, Equal Pay Today, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Women’s Law Center, and Public Citizen are calling on the Senate to strengthen its bill.

Their letter points to serious weaknesses in the Senate bill, including that it doesn’t call for an independent investigator, instead putting approval of settlements in the hands of the ethics committees of both the House and the Senate to sign off on if the settlement is because of a member of Congress’s own actions:

“This provision appears to provide an opportunity for a Member who has settled a claim to avoid personal accountability and to be absolved from reimbursing the taxpayers,” the groups wrote in the letter.

Additionally, the Senate bill fails to hold members liable for discrimination settlements:

“A Member who has committed wrongdoing should be liable for all damages negotiated in a settlement or awarded by a court; they should not be shielded from the consequences of their actions,” they wrote.

Seriously. Time for Congress to be held accountable—and the way for that to happen is for Congress to write its own rules to demand accountability.

This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on May 25, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.


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Stop asking women to change to make men feel comfortable in the workplace

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Numerous women have said that film producer Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed or raped them. But rather than blaming the man responsible for the sexual assault, conservative commentators, former White House officials, and journalists alike are turning their focus on eliminating interaction between men and women.

Last week, the New York Times published an investigation on the experiences of actresses who were alone with Weinstein and the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Weinstein, which occurred over the span of three decades. On Tuesday, The New Yorker published an article detailing the experiences of multiple women in excruciating detail. It also exposed the ways in which the industry protected Weinstein and how his employees helped him meet women, despite their discomfort in doing so.

Weinstein has been fired from the company he co-founded, and A-list celebrities, such as Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Judy Dench, George Clooney, and Jennifer Lawrence, have spoken out against him and his treatment of women he worked with. On Tuesday, Weinstein’s wife of a decade, Georgina Chapman, said she’s leaving him. On the surface level, it seems that Weinstein’s career is over and that his accusers have found justice. But the response to the Weinstein sexual harassment reports proves that instead of putting blame where it belongs — on sexual predators — some men are still interested in blaming women and their presence in the office for their own abuse.

Former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka, tweeted that all of these sexual assaults could have been avoided if Weinstein simply didn’t meet with women one-on-one. He referred to Vice President Mike Pence’s rule of not eating alone with any woman other than his wife, Karen, and suggested if Weinstein simply hadn’t met with women alone, he wouldn’t have assaulted them.

Gorka’s tweet laid bare the real argument that is being made when men say they can’t be alone with women. It perpetuates the cultural pretense that when men are sexually violent, it is simply an impulsive mistake, a part of their nature that they can’t control, instead of a decision they made to prey on particular women they know they can control or whose reports won’t later be believed. The New Yorker’s investigation into Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults clearly shows that his decisions were calculated and followed a pattern. For example, Weinstein reportedly used female executives to give the women he harassed a false sense of security before he met with them alone. The New Yorker piece read:

Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a â€honeypot’—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman.

Other men noted that women shouldn’t have met with Weinstein in hotel rooms, as if Weinstein didn’t also sexually assault women in his own place of business.

Weinstein used every tool available to him to manipulate women into meeting with him, including his colleagues and the impunity he enjoyed at his workplace. One of Weinstein’s producers told a woman that she was meeting several people for a Miramax party at a hotel, but when the woman arrived and the producer led her to the room, Weinstein was the only person there, according to the New Yorker. Weinstein also reportedly sexually assaulted a woman during daylight hours inside his Miramax office. He expected that some of the women he harassed and assaulted would speak out, and he made the consequences clear to them. The reporting on Weinstein shows that he is a man who knew how to intimidate and control women to force himself on them and keep them silent. There is nothing accidental about it. He was inventive, cunning, and powerful enough that a formal workplace culture never would have stopped him from sexually assaulting women.

Still, none of these details have stopped people from suggesting that a different kind of workplace would have solved the Harvey Weinstein problem and magically stop men from sexually harassing women. Josh Barro, a senior editor at Business Insider, wrote that the real problem is fun office cultures. Barro wrote for Business Insider:

But there are industries with cultures that involve after-hours social activities that blur the lines between business and leisure and can easily appear inappropriate for colleagues who could be suspected of sexual involvement.

Barro doesn’t think that getting rid of after-hours socializing will hurt women. He thinks it will break up all-male networks. To that, I laugh heartily. Men may not go to official after-hours events that their boss encourages them to attend, but such a ban certainly doesn’t prevent men from meeting with each other after work (and why should it?). The only result is that there isn’t an official employer-endorsed space for both men and women to gather. If women already feel shamed for meeting with men alone, it certainly won’t help for employers to make mixed-gender socializing seem strange, or even harmful.

In response to the Times piece detailing men’s concerns about accusations of sexual harassment or the “appearance of impropriety,” Barro wrote that instead of dismissing these men’s fears, the whole office culture must adapt to them and their concerns. He said it requires more than “just the hand wave of â€don’t harass women, it’s simple.’”

But it is that simple. The office culture that needs to be destroyed is not one that has happy hours. It’s one that has no real system of accountability for powerful men who could easily crush the careers of their subordinates. The reports about Weinstein follow a series of high-profile sexual harassment cases across a range of industries over the last year, including Fox News personalities, actors, musicians, and Silicon Valley investors and executives.

Still, Barro isn’t alone. The flurry of reports of sexual harassment have caused some men to decide to avoid one-on-one interactions with women altogether. As one orthopedic surgeon told the New York Times, “I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line. If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?”

The men interviewed didn’t mention the effects sexual harassment has on the career of the women who come forward, nor did they appear to understand the career risks women take to report sexual harassment. If they did, they might understand that it is not a flippant choice. By saying they’re not interested in interacting with women because they’re scared of sexual harassment allegations, these men demonstrate one of the main reasons why women don’t come forward with allegations sooner: they don’t want to be shut out of career opportunities.

Unfortunately, this view is all too common. A 2010 Center for Talent Innovation study found that almost two-thirds of male executives said they stopped having one-on-one meetings with junior female employees because they feared that people would think they were having an affair. Nearly two-thirds of people interviewed for a May poll by Morning Consult said people should take caution when meeting with people of the opposite sex at work. Fears that other people may view their meetings as improper stop the majority of senior men from meeting with women, even though women’s careers benefit from having sponsors.

Demanding that entire industries that revolve around evening cocktails and building relationships with colleagues outside of work hours stop all off-hours socialization is unrealistic, but even if it were possible, it still wouldn’t prevent sexual harassment. Weinstein himself met with women in a variety of settings, but he also found ways to cleverly shift where and when meetings would take place. The former assistants and executives mentioned in the New Yorker piece, some of whom facilitated the meetings, said there was a “culture of silence” around sexual assault.

Other sexual harassment allegations show that men don’t need social events or “fun” workplace atmospheres to harass women. Regarding a sexual harassment case at SoFi, an online personal finance company, the plaintiff said that he saw his manager put “explicit sexual innuendo and statements into normal workplace communications.” A former Fox News host, Eric Bolling, was accused of sending lewd photos to his female colleagues via text message in August. Should male colleagues no longer send professional communication to all co-workers or have their female colleagues’ phone numbers? That would be ludicrous. The best solution is for men to be as considerate to their female colleagues as they are to their male colleagues, to no longer shut them out of business meetings for the sake of “appearances,” and to work to create an environment that supports their female colleagues when they do come forward with harassment allegations.

Here’s another thought: They could also stop sexual harassing women.

This blog was originally published at ThinkProgress on October 11, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Casey Quinlan is a policy reporter at ThinkProgress. She covers economic policy and civil rights issues. Her work has been published in The Establishment, The Atlantic, The Crime Report, and City Limits.


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Want to Commit Career Suicide? Here’s How

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Nothing surprises me at work any more. After personally responding to over 50,000 emails from the corner office and the cube and 14 years as a workplace advice columnist, I thought I’d seen it all. I was wrong.

CareerBuilder asked employees how often they arrived late for work. At the end of 2007, 15 percent confided they’re late at least once a week. By the end of 2008, with a million people being laid off all around them, you’d imagine that the percentage of late arriving employees would decline dramatically.

And you’d be wrong.

The number of workers routinely showing up late for work increased to 20 percent, with 12 percent admitting that they showed up late more than once a week.

Suicide. That’s what leaps to mind because being consistently late for work is seen by many managers, and Human Resources, as the easiest excuse to fire someone. In fact, 30 percent of companies say they have.

Anyone who is a regular reader of Workplace911, knows that I see former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain as a human piñata, an example of wretched excess that just can’t be poked enough. Unfortunately, management doesn’t own a monopoly on stupid.

Take the California State employees who recently protested a cutback in their hours. Please! Too bad so many newspapers are going out of business, because these state employees need an easy way to learn that their plight ain’t so bad. They still have jobs.

Yes, this blog is an equal-opportunity criticizer. We take on CEOs and employees when either deserves a trip to the woodshed. Unfortunately this is far too rare, in a country where one political party seems to spend all its time fawning over leaders while the other party idolizes its followers. Isn’t it time for everyone to take off the rose-colored glasses and see how both sides have contributed to the nightmare we find ourselves in today?

Back to the increasing number of tardy workers, not only are more and more of us late, our excuses are getting exponentially dumber. You just can’t make this stuff up:

· “I got locked in my trunk by my son.”

· “My left turn signal was out so I had to make all right turns to get to work.”

· “I was attacked by a raccoon and had to stop by the hospital to make sure it wasn’t rabid.”

· And my personal favorite: “I feel like I’m in everyone’s way if I show up on time.”

I understand that the current economic headlines can drain the life force out of the most optimistic person. But seeing one in five workers choosing to be late stunned and depressed me. Let’s remember the context here, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press, 47 percent of workers fear they could be laid off, 71 percent know someone who has been and 63 percent report having trouble paying their bills. And the number of people late for work increases. Ouch!

I have a simple philosophy. I try to make it hard for my company to fire me. I make them work at it. Clearly I’m old school in this regard.

This survey reminded me of a boss who once wrote to me about one of his employees. She was sitting at her desk reading People magazine. He asked her to put it away and to get back to work. She began to cry and went on disability for two days. That’s what I’d call people who really need People.

Entitlement. That, unfortunately, seems to be the one thing that far too many bosses and employees share today, the belief that 90 percent of work is just showing up, perks included. We need to replace that “E” word with a new one, empathy. More employees who take the time to see the world through their boss’s eyes and more bosses who take the time to see through their employees’ eyes.

Our collective excesses got us into this mess. I believe only our collective empathy will allow us to dig our way out and to build a more humane and productive workplace. In the coming weeks I’ll outline strategies on how to accomplish this. Stay tuned…

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist and contributor to On The Money. He has been called “Dilbert with a solution.” Check out the free resources available at workplace911.com. You can contact Bob via bob@workplace911.com.


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