Company Policy

The corporate staff sets the tone and atmosphere for the rest of the company. Is your company committed to ending workplace harassment so that your entire workforce operates at maximum capacity? Have you included this in your mission statement, or do you even have a clearly defined harassment policy? Do you enforce that policy?

Do you understand how women and minority groups experience harassment in the workplace and how much time it takes away from productivity? Their experience at work involves many small road-blocks that most white men rarely notice, and negotiating these road-blocks takes time away from job duties, lowering the potential work productivity.

What a day in the life of employees can feel like:

Company policy, tradition, and culture, is set by corporate policies, rules, actions, and inaction. In far too many workplaces there is someone who thinks they are entitled to say whatever they want or think to others. They may be a manager or supervisor or even someone who has been with the company for a long time. Even one such person in the workplace can make work a hostile environment.

It may be an off-color joke using a particular minority group. It may be placing heavy emphasis on one particular person to do menial tasks without ever allowing them to move on to tougher things. If this person hands out the assignments and one person is repeatedly getting only grunt work, the system needs to be called into question.

It may be inappropriate touching. It may be someone who deliberately seeks out one individual to belittle publicly. Does the executive branch of the company look the other way when one of the supervisors misbehaves?

If all this is going on, why haven't you heard about it? For women and minority groups it means compromising their time, their physical, emotional, and mental energy to make sure that they do their job duties and still keep their job as they struggle to also negotiate daily harassment. Economics keeps most workers from reporting it, and what happens on a daily basis may never reach the corporate level.

Every day workers experience harassment or that not-quite harassment that makes you feel uncomfortable, but seems too petty to mention. Everyone who works has experienced harassment in some form or another, and in larger companies have been there to help each other out.

Sometimes one person gets deliberately targeted for some reason, and when others see it, they may do a lot of tiny invisible things to keep that person out of the line of fire as much as possible.

If workers choose to file reports or go beyond that to whistle-blower actions, they have to plan well in advance to find another job. You must be very careful, because one well-placed influential jackass can also have you blackballed from an entire industry.

Whistle-blowing gives you the appearance of protection, but the reality is that the act of whistle-blowing itself is seen as betraying the company and your co-workers. No one will let you stay without giving you a hard time. You will be forced out, or will get fed up and leave yourself.

People in companies can make your life miserable, but corporate officers can stop most of it with a good clearly defined harassment policy that is backed up by 100% enforcement of the policy. This means more productivity and better workplace conditions as added value for the company.

EEOC harassment.cfm

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/harassment.cfm

can violate title VII

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Age Discrimination Act 1967

Americans with Disabilities Act 1990

harassment in the workplace

http://jobsearch.about.com/od/harassment/tp/harassment-in-the-workplace.htm

your rights against discrimination and harassment

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/workplace-rights

What does sexual harassment look like?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2013/10/22/jeepers-creepers-what-does-sexual-harassment-look-like/