Preventing Harassment

In the green industry, more and more professionals are asking for assistance and guidance in dealing with their emerging sexual harassment issues. With workplaces changing, many tell us they would rather be proactive than reactive. I could not agree more (and the courts would agree with you as well). The proactive and progressive person will be way ahead if trouble ever comes to his or her organization.

National Conversation. Sexual harassment complains are piling up at the EEOC at the rate of about 15,000 per year. That has leveled off in the last few years, as the volume of the complaints had been increasing steadily for the past decade. Even though the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of sex, the law was not interpreted to include sexual discrimination at work until a decade later and did not become a major anti-sexual harassment toll until the 1990s.

When Did All of This Start? Some argue it all started with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. I have coined the media frenzy that brought these issues into our living room for the first time as “gender quake.” There have been plenty of aftershocks from Sen. Bob Packwood’s scandal to “Tailhook” to Aberdeen to Mitsubishi to, most recently, the Air Force Academy – to name just a few. Semi-weekly, you can count on reading something, somewhere, about somebody who was victimized or violated – and the employer always is portrayed as “asleep at the wheel” or uncaring. At times, the media has a tendency to sensationalize, as we all know, but I wouldn’t wait to act upon these emerging issues until to read about yourself in the newspaper. Get busy keeping yourself out of the newspaper.

No Relief in Sight. There seems to be no relief in sight. We are not expecting the number of complaints to decline anytime soon. Even though almost all of corporate America has formulated anti-discrimination policies and procedures in accordance with federal regulations first issued in the mid-1970s, Ellen Bravo, executive director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, told The Washington Post in 2002 that sexual harassment continues to be the biggest single source of complaints from working women.
If you don’t have a sexual harassment prevention policy, get busy putting one together. Incidentally, most employees now are moving from a sexual harassment prevention policy to a general harassment prevention policy to include all forms of harassment and to protect all employees.

The author is Mauricio Velasquez, president of the Diversity Training Group and Spanish Translation Services.