Big public companies are vulnerable to and dependent on consumer sentiment. That is their constituency and they tend to follow public opinion, once it is engaged. The same is true of news organizations which are both (in most cases) public companies and also trade directly on public sentiment, usually sentiment of different political persuasions.
Separate from the sexual harassment and misconduct issue, we see this in corporate America on issues of race, diversity, evolving sentiment on cultural issues like LGBTQ rights. Corporations are certainly not progressive by nature. You can see that in their aggressive support for President Trump’s tax and regulatory policies. But they are quite sensitive to public opinion on high profile issues. So corporate America in general has refused to follow the Trump line on hate groups, NFL player bashing and the like. Why? A corporation’s brand reputation, particularly with younger people, is one of its most critical assets. For consumer-facing brands, younger people are literally the future. Younger Americans have more progressive views on race and many ‘cultural’ issues. They are also less white. Corporations don’t have partisan polarization or electoral colleges.
Trump doesn’t care. His constituency is overwhelmingly white and disproportionately older. Indeed, many define their political outlook against the attitudes which are so prevalent among young Americans. Their constituencies are different. They act differently. [my emphasis]
But in the larger scheme of things, high-profile scandals of the Moore, Weinstein and Lauer types may not do a lot in themselves to address the real problem. Large organizations of all kinds as well as small businesses have a strong incentive for self-protection on these things, and sweeping them under the rug is usually the prescription. That's why non-disclosure agreements on settlements are so popular. I don't know what psychological studies may say about it. But I'm reasonably sure that the Moores and Weinsteins and Lauers aren't going to be deterred from genuinely predatory behavior by obligatory annual HR presentations or by seeing other employees warned or disciplined for telling lewd jokes at work.
That's not to disparage such actions. On the contrary. The Anita Hill revelation raised the problem of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings a generation ago in a very public way. And it prompted a round of reform that had real effect. There is a widespread awareness now that sexual harassment can involve a whole range of behaviors from creating a "hostile work environment" by telling offensive jokes or denigrating remarks to actual coercion for sexual activity.
But the decline of unions, employment-at-will laws, business deregulation generally, the increase of "precarious" jobs with more and more "independent contracting" all make systemic solutions more challenging. The restaurant business may be one with possibly the largest number of sexual harassment reports. (Meredith Clark, Report: Sexual harassment rampant in the restaurant industry MSNBC 10/07/2014) And despite the large number of chains, that's a notoriously decentralized and high-turnover business. Also in agriculture, construction, and service industries like restaurants, there are large percentages of undocumented workers who don't find it easy to use what recourse is available to citizens and legal residents. E.g., "You tell anybody about me showing you my dick in the back office and I'll call ICE to arrest your children at their school."
One thing that could be mandated legislatively with some reasonable chance of enforcement would be to somehow legally obligate personnel/human resource departments to have a responsibility to defend employees in some meaningful way. Because right now, HR departments in practice think their only job is to defend employers to the extent they can get away with it. That would probably involve some kind of more extensive auditing requirements along the lines of compliance audits in medical facilities. But that's heresy to the gospel of deregulation and "free-market" competition.
But there has to be enforceable legal frameworks if there is going to be a widespread improvement from the currrent situation. The Lauer and Weinstein cases emphasize to me the importance of distinguishing between "routine" but unacceptable problems like inappropriate language or flirty behaviors, on the one hand, and the more serious and even criminal behavior like inviting employees to a hotel room and exposing your privates to them or locking people in your office to try to coerce them into sex. Because awareness campaigns can actually be effective on things like that. And they often can be handled effectively without a lot of disruption to operations through management counseling or warnings or mild disciplinary measures. Even then, it requires management to take the rules seriously.
More serious predatory behavior involving direct physical, financial or psychological coercion are not so likely to be deterred by such measures. People have to know that they will get in real trouble with that kind of behavior.
There will always be some people who think they can get away with things other people can't. We might call that the you-can-grab-'em-by-the-pussy problem. For those people, the laws have to provide an effective backstop against the individual behaviors. And the laws need to require businesses and public organizations to prioritize combating such acts.
Banning nondisclosure agreements might contribute to the solution. Although I must admit I haven't looked into what the downsides of such a ban might be for victims. I can imagine Republicans trying to sneak through some "tort reform" under the guise of banning nondisclosure agreement, by which they mean making it harder for customers or employees to bring civil charges against companies.
An effective and enforceable legal framework is essential. The Sarbannes-Oxley law that came in the wake of a raft of corporate scandals like Enron's in the early 2000's required senior managers to personally certify that they have found the financial statements of their organizations to be free of known material accounting problems. (Lobbyists always push to whittle down such laws over time, but that's not a excuse to not enact necessary measures in the first place.) Something like that could be a significant improvement on the sexual harassment issue.
Because legislation also needs to take into acdount that HR departments are good at demonstrating progress, even when there is not any. Awards from some seemingly respectable non-profit entities saying that your company is "one of the best places for women to work" or the like can be bought through "charity" contributions to them.
The broad nature of the category of "sexual harassment" can also be exploited for distorted reporting. A company could, for instance, make a push to have managers and supervisors counsel people any time they hear about some mildly offensive remark or double-entendre humor in the workplace, while briskly covering up much more serious acts of coercion and exhibitionism on the part of senior officials in the company. But they could then count up the number of counseling sessions over using profanity or racy humor to say, "individual management interventions against instances of sexual harassment increased by 50% in 2018," though the company attorneys would no doubt insist on more ambiguous language than "instances of sexual harassment."
One final comment. Josh Marshall is right that companies as well as public agencies are sensitive to "public opinion, once it is engaged." That once it is engaged is a crucial point. A CEO or major media star getting nailed with credible evidence of gross sexually abusive conduct can engage public opinion. The first-level supervisor in the marketing-communication department engaging in such behavior is not going to engage a mass audience and is much easier to cover up.
This is a complicated set of problems. Well-publicized scandals like the ones we're seeing not, whether they should be called a "sex panic" or not, can highlight the more general problem. Effective, enforceable solutions are much more difficult to achieve.
No comments:
Post a Comment