Corrections or additions?
This article by Peter J. Mladineo was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on
July 22, 1998. All rights reserved.
New Rules for Sexual Harassment
The United States Supreme Court has just made some
very big decisions in regard to America’s favorite workplace
controversy.
Two cases, Burlington Industries vs. Ellerth, and Farragher vs. City
of Boca Raton, provide new, clearer guidelines for sexual harassment
that many have praised as beam of light through a region renowned
for its murkiness.
“The pair of 7-2 decisions, issued on the final day of the court’s
term, cut through a thicket of confusing and contradictory lower-court
rulings that had grown up in the 12 years since the justices first
ruled that sexual harassment was a form of employment
discrimination,”
wrote Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. “The rulings
won immediate praise across an unusually broad spectrum of both
management
and civil rights groups for bringing coherence to the law and
providing
incentives for preventing harassment and dealing promptly with
problems
that occur.”
Two upcoming seminars address these new precedents. Grotta, Glassman
& Hoffman, the Roseland-based law firm, hosts a discussion of sexual
harassment and other recent court decisions on Wednesday, July 29,
at 8:30 a.m. at the Woodbridge Place Sheraton. Call 973-992-4800 for
information. Also, American Humanagement Associates gives an executive
briefing on Tuesday, August 4, at 8 a.m. at the Trenton Business and
Technology Center. Call 609-989-9890 for more information.
Highlights of the decisions include these new guidelines:
Employers need an anti-harassment policy. The employermust take “reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly anysexually harassing behavior.” The employee is also required to”take advantage of any preventative or correctiveopportunities”regarding the claim the employer provided beforehand.And an employee who resists a supervisor’s advances need not havesuffered a job detriment to win a sexual harassment suit. This alsomeans, for example, that an employee who is not promoted because ofincompetence could win a harassment case by drawing attention topreviousallegations of harassment.In each of these situations, the employer’s safeguardin this latter case is an anti-harassment policy. “Employers canprotect themselves from sexual harassment allegations by having aclear anti-harassment policy and by following through on thepolicy,”explains Dominick Bratti, 35, a partner at Grotta, Glassman& Hoffman. “It’s a legal way to say they’re going to take careof the problem. The flip side of that is, the court says the employeeshave to use the policy. So you can’t claim that you were sexuallyharassed by a co-worker and meanwhile you sat on your rights for twoyears. The employee has an obligation to complain under the policy.There will be less opportunity for an employee to fabricate aclaim.”The company can no longer claim ignorance. The old excuse,”I didn’t know what the supervisor was doing,” doesn’t workany more.Kate Butler feels that ignorance of sexual harassmentis part of a workplace culture conducive to sexual harassment.”Allof this stuff is happening on somebody’s watch,” says Butler,a 48-year-old gender issues consultant and 360-degree feedbackproponent(U.S. 1, January 7) who started American Humanagement Association(aha!) 12 years ago. “We have been socialized to turn a blindeye and a deaf ear when we see icky stuff.”Sexual harassment, she insists, usually happens within sight ofeverybodyin the office, and, she claims, sexual harassers always behaveserially.The problem lies with witnesses not being willing to step outsidetheir comfort levels to confront. “It’s impolite to stick ournose in and say stop that,” she says.The typical perpetrator counseled by Butler is over age 50 and isof high value to the company. “They want to keep him, but theywant to defuse him as a ticking time bomb,” says Butler.”That’sthe most profound work that I do. I change these people. We cry andit’s not a lot of fun.”But in the end, it’s all in the day’s work for Butler. “It’s theclient’s pocketbook I’m protecting,” she says. “Goodmanagementpractices can be completely undone when you’re harboring sexualharassmentin your midst.”For a small business, training employees about sexual harassment couldturn out to be a rather expensive transaction. One human resourceexpert estimates that such a seminar could run in the neighborhoodof $1,500 to $2,500. “Small businesses are going to have to spenda lot more time educating their managers and their supervisors,”says Steve Rosenthal, CEO of Employee Management Inc., aprofessionalemployer organization based in Woodbridge. “It’s not like it usedto be years ago. Today, you have to stay on top of the trainingaspect.There’s a big emphasis on the employers to teach the employees.”Rosenthal’s firm, which acts as the employer of record for roughly15,000 employees at 800 client sites, also takes care of humanresourcefunctions — including sexual harassment training. He likens thenew court decisions to the court’s attitude towards other kind ofcorporate training, such as 401(k) plans. “The onus is on theemployer to make sure that the employees are educated on investmentdecisions,” he says. “If the employees lose money on badinvestments,the employer may be held responsible.” Another analogy was theSupreme Court case concerning the Exxon Valdez oil spill off theAlaskancoast. “The courts found that Exxon was liable because it didnot put enough protocol into the training process for drug and alcoholabuse,” says Rosenthal.While the ramifications of these new rulings may take yearsto rise to the surface, many cheer this as a victory of common senseover a system that offered built-in excuses to management andgold-linedopportunities for extortionists. But it may also end up that the onlypolitically correct salutation in the office will begin with”Citizen.””I think there’s an element of political correctness in everythingthat goes on these days, especially in this area of the law,”says Bratti. “People who are not 100 percent-P.C. open themselvesup for those problems.”– Peter J. MladineoTop Of PageWebsite AdviceIf you can’t think of a reason why Web surfers shouldbookmark your website, they’re not going to do it. That’s advice fromBlaine Greenfield, a marketing consultant who teaches a courseabout Internet marketing at Bucks County Community College.He also lectures at the New Business Learning Center on “The Truthabout the Internet,” on Tuesday, July 28, at 7 p.m. at the SummitBank building at 6 East Trenton Avenue in Morrisville, Pennsylvania.Call 215-736-3156 for more information.A business can’t thrive on Web profits alone, he says. “If youthink you’re just going to put up a Web page and the orders are goingto flow in it isn’t just going to happen. The Web can be veryeffectiveas a supplemental medium.”As far as getting traffic to the site, most probably know not to relyon random new business flow (unless your site has a valuablegeneralizeddomain name like https://www.business.com orhttps://www.-pizza.com).Greenfield suggest lots of advertising, registering on lots of searchengines, and having a “compelling reason for them to go to yourwebsite.”Another tip: Update the page regularly. And make your search enginedescription as specific as possible.”The Internet has given the small business owner the chance tocompete with any major corporation,” Greenfield reports. “Thecost is not prohibitive. It’s come down phenomenally. The caveat isthat if you’re going to do it yourself it’s going to take time, andyou’re going to have to stay on top of it.”Greenfield contributes to a page sponsored by the New Jersey SmallBusiness Development Corporation,www.nj.com/njsbdc/marketing.html.This is a page with resources and articles for the small businessowner.Here are other sites Greenfield bookmarks on his computer:Http://www.askjeeves.com. He calls this “the bestsearch engine out there” because it allows users to search forinformation using full sentence queries. Caution: This is a definitelyan example of out-of-the-box searching. Instead of spitting out hits,this contraption asks more questions. Be prepared to gawk confusedlyat the interface for a little while. And for those who give up, AskJeeves also has a standard parallel search engine — a searchenginethat simply sends your query to several other search engines andprocessthose searches simultaneously.Http://www.dogpile.com. This parallel search engine isuser friendly and fast, and likely to get hits on any search, nomatterhow remote the material.Http://www.virtualpresents.com. This allows you to sendpictures of everything from a Buffalo to a tube of lipstick. It’sa nice alternative to E-mail.Http://www.bluemountain.com. This site lets you sendelectroniccards to loved ones. Write your own poetry, or send a premade card.The graphics may be paltry, but it’s the thought that counts.Http://www.anywho.com/telq.html. Got a business’s phonenumber but can’t remember its name? Got an old flame’s name andaddressbut not his or her phone number? This site is for you. Its softwareallows searches to be conducted using telephone numbers, or evenpartialnumbers. And it does more standard people/business searches by name.But as with any people-finding software, don’t expect a high degreeof success.Http://babefish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?.Need something translated? This site has language translation softwarefor English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese. Just type ina sentence or paragraph and suddenly you can see what it looks likeanother language. Nifty. Especially for Americans.Greenfield also observes an increasing public acceptance ofInternet commerce. It has become much easier to convince people tobuy things online using their credit card. “The security concernsare not what they were six months ago,” he says. “They’vebeen improved now to the extent that it’s relatively safe and secureto order anything.”Which leads to his last point: Don’t operate your website byyesterday’srules. “You want to be as current as possible,” saysGreenfield.”Or you fall by the wayside.”Previous StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
