SCOTUS Has Made It Much Easier To Be Harassed At Work

[onehandle]

Thanks to two recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, workplace harassers – and the companies that employ them – are more likely to get away with making other people's lives miserable. Generally speaking, it's easier for employees to hold companies liable for harassment if the harasser is a supervisor. It's a higher bar for a company to be liable for behavior among co-workers.

But in the first of these two cases, the justices narrowed the definition of a supervisor. They said that for a company to be liable in racial or sexual harassment cases, the harasser has to be a supervisor who has authority to hire, fire or demote an employee. Many of the country's lower courts had previously defined a supervisor as a person in charge of your day-to-day activity, which I'd argue is the logical definition of the term.

That effectively turns most middle managers in America – and in cases where human resources departments are in charge of hiring and firing, possibly all managers – into a "co-worker."

"The effect of that is where you have employees who have their day-to-day work controlled by other employees, if those employees harass the people who work under them, those people may be reasonably nervous about complaining," said Deborah Widiss, an employment discrimination expert and associate professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. "And if they do complain, the employer is far less likely to be held responsible."

http://www.philly.com/philly/jobs/Its_now_much_easier_to_be_harassed_at_work.html

[reformist2]

1. Simon Dempsey knows all about it...

[NV Whino]

3. Wow, I'd slap David Thorne upside the head.

[hfojvt]

6. except none of that counts

it's not sexual or racial harassment

from the OP "They said that for a company to be liable in racial or sexual harassment cases,"

I had a supervisor harassing me for years and I did not see anything in the employee handbook that prohibited it. The policies were only about racial or sexual harassment.

But even if they did have such a policy, what are you supposed to do? If I complain and they do not fire him, then I still have to work under him every day. Way too easy for him to get revenge for something he would consider to be a betrayal.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. In schools, that would immediately let building supervisors off the hook.

i.e. principals and other out-of-classroom types. Since hiring/ firing is *technically* done at the district level.

Open season for stalkers and freaks of all variety. Another reason NOT to go into education, kids.

Great. Party of 5 strikes again. So... when are we gonna get around to canceling that show?

[EC]

4. What about sexual assaults?

Can only supervisors be held to that too?

[BainsBane]

7. A sexual assault is a criminal matter

So a victim can report it to the police. Of course there is a real possibility she could face retaliation for doing so. Not that SCOTUS cares.

[bemildred]

5. They made it much safer to harass your employees, is what they did. nt

[Igel]

8. Ouch. I can see it both ways.

I've had low-level supervisors in small companies who had little to now power apart from monitoring what I was doing and keeping me busy. It would be entirely inappropriate for that person to take the fall for workplace discrimination. She could do no more damage to me than any other coworker. She had no de jure authority and no de facto authority.

My building principal, though, doesn't hire and fire. He recommends. But he doesn't evaluate me--an assistant principal does. So the AP observes and rummages through all the other stuff on record about me and recommends something to the principal. The principal reviews it for 20 seconds, makes sure my job's needed, and kicks the recommendation upstairs. The HR people look at the recommendation, makes sure my job's needed, and with the superintendent's authority firmly in hand, implements the recommendation. 'A year-to-year employee, the school board doesn't ever need to know I exist.

I piss off the AP by not acceding to any harrassment, and I have to argue with the principal to reverse his recommendation. Strictly speaking, the principal could just assign me another supervisor. In practice, I'd have to prove harrassment. If the principal harrasses me I'd have to fight with HR and schedule a meeting with the superintendent. Unless I have a lawyer there, that's going to go badly for me.

In other words, the de facto authority there goes mostly to the lowest level. De jure is at the highest level.

A decision saying low-level supers bear responsibility is inappropriate for the first job I had and makes the company heavily dependent on what amounts to trivial supervisority authority. A decision saying low-level supers bear no responsibility is inappropriate for the second job where the low-level supervisors basically rule the roost, with the upper echelons all but rubberstamping their decisions.

Bad law all around.